Plan of action

Following the presentation of my initially idea and context behind it, I have come away happy with the direction I am going in. The Institute of Applied Autonomy’s project iSee has given me a firm base from which to develop from.
Plan of action:
I need to enhance the context of the project, find more inspiration and projects that show similar concept representation to that of mine.
I am not happy with the initial proposal of how my project will be graphically represented. With more research and development I should have a better idea of how I will display the installation to the audience.

Chronos

Created by Jason Cheah, and myself, Chronos is a motion detection based project. It brings to light a different view/concept of movement and time spent in front of a camera.
The piece logs a person’s movement and displays it through graphic representation of time. This is in the form of a clock face, where, dependent on the movement during each hour, the face numbers grow any become more prominent as an hour becomes busier.
For my project I want to develop the same idea of a person’s movement being represented in a graphical form. I am undecided whether I want to bring in the factor of time dependant animation that was used in Chronos, but I will play around with ideas and see how the representation fits into what im trying to display.

Initial idea development

After looking into what sort of motion detection animation I think best suits the context of my project I have decided that it does not represent what I want it to. Although the audience would be drawn to the projected image, I feel that it is too straight forward and is not symbolic enough to warrant being the output of my piece.

Further thinking needed….

Initial thought development

A visualisation of movement occurring in the public space

I want to use a camera to record the movements in a public area and project those images, altered into coloured pixels onto a wall in that public space so that the people going through the area are more then made aware they are being caught on camera but they have their attention drawn to it.

Stanza – More use of CCTV

This is a piece called Urban Rhymes. In this piece he takes CCTV feeds from around the city and displays them in a piece of art. This project is not ‘live’ tho, its just a sample of what he wanted to do. Searching for the Soul of the City. A continuous life cycle within the emergent city space, driving forever through the networks and arteries.

Stanza Art

This artworks questions who owns the data. Who is watching us in these spaces. Most buildings have CCTV and they use it to observe the people inside the space, ie the public.

By hacking the real time analogue and digital CCTV feeds you can reclaim the data space from private to public domain.

All the resulting CCTV network is projected over the building. It is also presented online online by hacking the live CCTV feed.

Other references – Stanza

Looking for other examples that could be used in relation to the development and influence of my project, I came across Stanza, who happened to be displaying in Plymouth Art Center. I went down to speak to him and he was very helpful and took me through how and why he had done many of his projects.

About Stanza:

UK based artist.

Artworks are typically a reflection of cities, urbanity, and CCTV.

The other main group of works are coded abstract interactive paintings, mashups, and DNA.

A large amount of his work is environment dependant and uses cameras or senses that are then often displayed in a public space.

Context behind iSee

IAA attempt to ‘beg, pester and re-configure a culture of surveillance in a manner that is ironic, funny and sometimes cute, but also activist and critical to the core’ (IAA, 2002).

A study carried out by the leading user of surveillance devices found that there was a tendency to focus and single out particular individuals. ‘Black people were between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half times more likely to be surveilled than one would expect from their presence in the population’ (www.appliedautonomy.com, 2002).

Minorities, women, youths, outsiders and activists all could be said to have a good reason to stay out of sight and take the path with least surveillance.

Eg. ‘Hooded tops, baseball caps and swearing have been outlawed at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent as part of a crackdown on anti-social behaviour’ (news.bbc.co.uk, May 2005).

Augmented Reality

Finally after much trial and error, Ive managed to get my own rendered shape. The problems I was having previously were solved by using ARTag and 3DS max. I had to export the 3D shapes as .ase files and export a rendered .jpg file.

Augmented reality research

While doing some research into interactive augmented reality I came across this example. Its not specifically augmented reality I found the level of interaction was highly useful to the user.