Nathaniel Propp
Philip Baker
Final
Project
Concept
For the final project we wanted to explore an overarching
theme. In previous projects we explored dementia and, after brainstorming, we
arrived at the conclusion that the loss of identity is the aspect of dementia
that was we wanted to emphasize on. We realized that the idea of identity was
extremely promising as an area of exploration. While the dementia piece was the
second work in our presentation, we ultimately built our idea around it. When looking
at dementia from this focus of identity, we realized that it is effectively the
painfully slow decay of identity fading away. From this end, we decided to take
it back to a relatable message of routine. Both of us are at working age in our
lives and felt that our routine had become very much of our identity. So we
came up with the piece titled “Lost in the Routine” we picked a persona of a
young office worker whose routine has taken over his life. We composed a video
of a mixture of our filmed footage as well as combined it with found footage.
Special thanks to
College Humor
GoPro and YouView
We then made this daily routine of the person come to life in
a very boring way. However in the spirit of repetitive nature of a routine we
then duplicated the video by 4X and speed it up slightly. We repeated this
process until we ended up with a very abstract chaos that reveals the craziness
of allowing a mundane routine to dictate how you spend your life, and
ultimately become who you are.
We then followed this piece up with “Dementia.” For this we
searched for poems over the subject to gather inspiration and to clarify what
exactly dementia is, and how it affects people. We cam across a poem by Juliet
Rains. It reads as:
Alzheimers
By Juliet Rains
You try to talk,
Your words strung
together
Like a cross-word
puzzle that still needs to be solved.
You try to read,
The story like a foreign movie
Missing the subtitles,
No way for you to
connect the dots.
You try to walk,
Your feet don’t respond
As you sink to the bottom
Of the vast ocean of nothingness that is you now.
You try to remember
But the gate is closed,
The lock secure,
The key,
Oh, that key,
Who took that key,
Who took you away from you,
Away from me
This poem helped us formulate a composition that takes the
views of several different people suffering from Alzheimer’s and relate it back
to the poem. This one was a very poignant piece for us. We were both lucky
enough to have very positive and influential elders in our life. However, their
absences is just as influential as their presence was.
The final piece we intended as an installation piece that is
meant to be interacted with after the presentation. Using processing we wanted
to reflect the focus back on the view in order to reflect on their own identity.
So sequentially: The first work was meant to draw attention to how an identity
is formed through actions, The second is to show how fragile identity really
is, and the third is to draw attention to how you see yourself now. Using
processing we created the installation to react to both light and sound. We
manipulated the light to distort the captured video of the viewers. Very much
in the same way we all have distorted perceptions of our selves. We then used
sound to drive the opacity of the video. This means that you have to literally
make noise to be noticed.
After completion of this project, and ultimately the course,
we believe that our work with identity really elevated us to a new conceptual
use for the technology.
Technology and
Technique
Many thanks to Ronald Wu and Bill Watts for using Maya and
Rhino to create the arch form in 3D shape. Another big thanks to them for
utilizing Pepakura and the UTD laser cutter to fabricate it in real space.
Once we had the arch form, we used 2 projectors provided by
Andrew Scott and The University of Texas at Dallas.
We used Madmapper to help calibrate and shape our
projections onto the form.
Modul8 was a great tool for us to manage and manipulate our
video content. By connecting a midi controller we were able to control aspects
of the video, such as: lightness, contrast, blur, noise, RGB values, etc. to
tailor a live performance around the piece.
For the final work in the presentation, we utilized
processing to compose a sketch that took webcam feedback and broke it down into
adjustable pixel cells sizes of averaged color. We then determined the
brightness from cell to cell to determine the z location in processing P3D
space to distort the image but retain some control via lighting.
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