Scott Varland @ ITP

The “Melting Face” is a movement tracking, kinetic sculpture. The sculpture is constructed from metal piping, wire, pulleys and ice. When looking at the sculpture, it will slowly turn and look back at you. The tracking is done with a computer vision program written in Java (many thanks to Dano and v3ga for his blob code). The face is motorized with four servos controlled by an Arduino. This physical system interfaces with a PC connected to a video camera.

I wrote the Java face detection code in Eclipse. It uses the BlobDetection library written for Processing. To find the face of spectators, the program scans the image for polygons created by the torso and head and then approximates the location of the eyes based on the ratio between the two. The resulting x and y coordinates are sent serially to the ATMEGA microcontroller which then sends the appropriate command to each of the four servo motors - moving the face. An algorithm smoothes output to prevent jerky reactions and a steady and slow tracking gaze for the sculpture.

The face on the sculpture was made by taking a mold of my own face. The process involved being asphyxiated in silicon and then wrapped in plaster bandages. I had two straws to breathe through and was left to remain calm while it all cured for 45 minutes or so – but I think the results were worth it.

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Alexander Calder was born to a painter and sculptor who encouraged him to do something ‘safer’ with his life. After receiving a degree in mechanical engineering and working jobs at a logging camp in Canada and in the boiler room of a steam ship, he soon found his contentment lie elsewhere. He moved to New York to become an artist. Among his first inspirations were the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circuses. This would lead to the creation of his traveling Cirque de Calder and introduced him to the materials and forms that served him throughout his life.

Calder is most famous for his mobiles. Early forms of these kinetic sculptures were motorized. Later he came to realize that movement was most expressive when driven only by the wind. He often remarked that the balance in his sculpture, in the systems and forms he used came from an observation he made while traveling between New York and San Francisco while working on the steam ship…

“It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch — a coil of rope — I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other.”

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This mechanism uses a Peaucellier-Lipkin linkage to light a match and, well - destroy itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaucellier-Lipkin_linkage

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