Julia Fernandez
An playful, yet unconventional mirror commenting on the absurdity of reality.
https://jftech-art.com/f/an-unconventional-mirror
Description
In our project, we invite visitors to take a seat in a chair and look at themselves in our unconventional mirror. The “mirror” is 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide and was created with 20 polystyrene spheres fixed to wooden dowels. The dowels are attached to a hollow base that conceals the power source and any wiring, including the wiring for the webcam. Across from the mirror is a chair for visitors to sit and gaze at themselves, positioned in a way that mimics a traditional vanity mirror. A projector will be fixed from the ceiling and at the bottom of the chair for full projection mapping coverage of the spheres. Since it is projection mapping, we would like to request a darker room. When a visitor is seated in the chair, PoseNet will detect specific facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) isolate them, and assign them to a sphere in the p5.js sketch. We then take the p5 sketch into MadMapper and projection map each circle onto our physical spheres. In the p5 sketch, the isolated features will jump around to different positions, which in turn will jump around from sphere to sphere via projection mapping. When there is no human present, the p5 sketch will display a TV noise animation.
The project is a commentary on the absurdity of reality. By dissecting your facial features, it is easier to see how strange we look and how much stranger we look when our eye or our nose is isolated. The project is playful because it is a fun interactive installation that anyone can use, but it is also uncanny and even uncomfortable because it dissects, exposes, and magnifies your face. Though people love looking at themselves, how will they feel when their faces are distorted in such a way?
Classes
Comm Lab: Hypercinema, Creative Computing