They are been few days since Mirrors exhibition passed and I noticed that I did not write too much about it.
Before writing about what I showed it could be interesting to report some impressions I had during seeing and helping for the Resonator workshop: all that way to talk, organize, collaborate and working actively in the amazing Stephenson works building really stimulated me to focus more on work on physical objects, also as a possible way to access and force digital imaginary ( i really love the artwork proposed by Nurit Bar-Shai in this sense // More on this topic in other posts).
Turning back to Processing due to the time available for working and showing something I decided to use it as a kind of tool for sketching and testing a possible application of an Idea I had during the workshop.
Processing is an useful software for build interactive systems, for its extended availability of libraries that can communicate with microcontroller like Arduino that is one of the most common used for building interactive artworks.
The idea:
The word “mirror” resemble to me the idea of representation of self through the act of seeing, but also a possible lack of trust of memory.
What I thought is an interactive installation involving people looking through a mirror and then looking inside a wooden box placed in a different place in the same room. The result of this action is the image of themselves impressed on the retina caused by the triggering of image through a led matrix inside the box. The image is captured by an hidden camera on the rear of the mirror, that needs to be a two-way type.
This small sketch on paper should give approximately an idea of what I would like to develop (I know, it’s not the best drawing that probably you saw in your life):
After discussing this idea with Jamie, that helped me to think and refine the concept, I tried to figure out what I should need in order to do this project.
This is what i thought:
- a two way mirror with a nice frame (thanks Jamie for this);
- a usb webcam (not visible);
- 1 or 2 arduinos (not visible – to be defined later)
- 1 a small computer running Arduino and Processing (not visible);
- 1 or more LDR or Ultrasound sensors (not visible – to be defined later);
- 1 wooden box;
- 1 68×48 (or less, but not than 48×32) ultra-bright blue LED MATRIX (to be placed inside the box);
The hope is to try to transmit the captured image to the LED MATRIX.
But how can I do this?
I think that a possible process could be done in two parts:
a) the conversion of the captured image from the webcam in a dot-style matrix with Processing.
b) the transmission of the image to the LED Matrix connected to computer by Arduino, through appropriate pulse width modulation (PWM) per each LED (by Processing, as well ), in order to give an impression of image composed by each value of brightness per point (like monochromatic image).
More details on interaction process and examples of codes and image will be published in two next coming posts soon.