or The Land of the H(ij)acked Self or Comic Strip Selfies
Mark-making and story-telling are innate human traits. This interactive installation/app examines portrait-making by compositing a sketch/cartoon-feed (perhaps stop-motion/frame extraction for added effect] over the "h(ij)acked" live video stream. Participants add text bubbles (via twitter and google speech api) that are saved via Node.js/CouchDb to produce interconnectivity between selfies. As such, it examines the proliferation and consumption of the modern day digital "portrait," and suggests that no selfie needs to be an island....
As an artist, I have sketched and painted all my life. With the advent of the digital selfie, I find this digital portraiture very curious. Are selfies portraits or are they more like caricatures? If portraiture may be defined as a captured moment in time embeding an emotional quality then maybe they are quasi- portraits, but actually I think they are more like caricatures... ? How about our ever-growing video library? Where is the creative process now that we do not require painterly expertise, a skilled hand, nor expensive photography equipment? Furthermore, how are these images interpreted and consumed by others?
As a software developer, I have reverse-engineered the digital image-making process. I have deconstructed digital video via opencv and have gone backwards into the nexus of portraiture, promoting the tenderness of a line, the emotional connection to a moment in time. It is cool to this composited live video, broken down frame-by-frame, and reconstructed not as a carbon-copy of the present moment but more of an artistic interpretation. Can I leverage video's reflexive nature in a commentary about the origin and rise of the selfie? I think the result is not merely another avatar but something more meaningful. The installation will capture these individual narratives and compose them into an ongoing mashup movie, a mediated video stream that is more than your average 'selfie' feed, as our data and online identities are more than just fodder for rabid consumption.
update 3/25/14 - Android app part of the project - a "never-ending comic book strip"... Can't do it by March 28th, but it'll be fun to do and I think people would dig making a "chain" of selfies.. Kind of like Telephone but all visual..... Whether you could upload to an external version oF never-ending story, not sure... Without curation via a public creation space (ie. taking a picture in a musueum or gallery space), I couldn't rule out naked selfies/what -have-you....
update 3/18/14 -
Never Ending Story meets Never-ending Comic Strip meets Selfie meets Twitter === AWESOME
update 2/17/14 -
I am thinking about pushing the comic book caricature idea further. Yes, it's a kind of portrait, but it is also inherently reflexive in how we see ourselves through the eyes of others. I am imagining a whole wall of animated selfies in comic-book form complete with thought-bubbles....
eg.
#Link to Prototype
please see my GitHub oF repository- as noted in the /project_code section and the external Libraries openFramworks, node.js, and CouchDB