Experimental Camera_ Jasmin Liang

Description

The Experimental Camera I created is a deconstructed portrait camera. Through this deconstructed lens, one can only view another’s face in a fragmented manner, in that, one will see not the entirety of one’s visage but the individual components of the face: eyes, nose, cheek, mouth. These components are laid out in a grid, along with the vertex silhouette of the face. In addition, there are a few visual abstraction that measure the different expressions of the face. For example, the three color rings each represent how wide-open is one’s eye, how high one raises one’s brow and how much one’s mouth widens. The sizes of those rings change based on those measurements at any given moment. The red ball next to the silhouette’s mouth measures the volume input. The louder one speaks, the larger the ball will grow.

Design Process & Reflection

These are the three initial sketches I began with. I eventually chose the last one because I find it visually and conceptually most interesting. When I was brainstorming the project, I was considering how computers and phones are proxies of our bodies in the times of pandemic. The camera becomes our eye, the microphone and speaker our ears and mouth. I was also recalling those strange moments when zoom crashes, the image glitches while the voice continues on. It is those moments that the appearance of a smooth, continuous reality based on algorithm shatters. At those moments, one comes to realize that our body do not get to experience the full presence of another person any more, but rather as disparate images, texts and voices. In addition, I was also thinking about the early history of photography and how the arrival of the first camera ushered in the clinical examination/deconstruction of the human body. In that spirit, I thought it would be interesting to create a deconstructed portrait camera.

When the final product was made, the effect was something rather different from a fragmented other. I was very much reminded of Janet Vertesi’s famous ethnographic book Seeing Like A Rover. In a way, this turned out to be a poetic interpretation of the mind space of a machine, seeing the human face, deconstructing and grasping it in its own terms.

For the implementation, I created an array containing the variable positions[i]. Then with a for loop, I created a grid out of the separate facial features based on the captures of those positions. As for the rings and volume ball, I created them based on the “smile bar” template.