At the beginning of this projects I was attempting to ideate concepts for the interactive manufactory prompt; trying to come up with a way to use my genetic code and literal code to create a manufactory piece of art, and after much preliminary research on what people have already been doing in relation to genome art I have decided that it’s too easy to come up with another dumb idea and this is the kind of project that should brew in the back of your mind for awhile…
So I switched gears and started to work on the foundation for a telematic project.
To lay down a basis for my project I should first talk about what sparked my interest in doing this… in recent months, I’ve found myself to be quite frustrated to be quite frustrated with the fact that during video chatting sessions, My father always seems to be looking at himself. It’s clear that his gaze isn’t directed towards me because he only looks at me when I say something that really grabs his attention. Through conducting interviews I found that this seems to be a major pain-point for the population of people who have interacted with him over Skype.
In light of this frustration I wanted to make a video chatting interface specifically meant to communicate with him (or people like him who are blatantly checking themselves out the entire time you are engaging with them…) I decided that it would be fun to go down the path of obstructing his own view of himself during these sessions so that he would be forced to stop looking at himself. Some examples being:
- His face gets smaller, and smaller, the longer he stares at himself
- His face disappears and re-appears in each of my pupils on his screen so that he will be more inclined to look me in the eye
- His phone (fondly referred to as “Lil’ Debbie”) vibrates violently when ever he looks at his own image.
- The sound on his end goes completely mute and he hears nothing until he is making eye contact again
- And other such fun interactions (always open to suggestions)
So far I am in the process of developing the gaze tracking process locally (through the use of openCV and processing). I hope to have that completely worked out by Friday so that I might begin to establish a way of interfacing and sharing video between himself and I and from there modify the way that the program responds to his obsession with his likeness.