As a design enthusiast, I have had the privilege of exploring various design technologies during my tenure at Parsons. Below are some of the projects I have undertaken that have helped sharpen my design skills, passion and dedication towards my creative practice.
Conventional cameras imitate the resolution, depth of field, and colour range of the human eyes. The machine’s close resemblance to human biology and its claim to deliver objective reality camouflages the embedded biases in camera technology such as the unfortunate racial bias in the history of photography. For this Project, we were asked to design and create an experimental camera with a specific purpose or usage in mind. We had to make an intentional choice on the context of what our camera should be used for.
The purpose of this camera is to see ones-self from a different perspective, we are so used to looking at ourselves in the mirror or through cameras in a certain way that we can’t imagine ourselves in any other form and I wanted to shift that perspective by seeing yourself a little differently. Focusing and zooming into parts that deserve attention, it is a way to see yourself up close, build a relationship with your innate being, accept and appreciate all of you.
The code begins by declaring several variables that define the dimensions and position of five rectangles that will be copied from the captured video and pasted onto the canvas. The rectangles vary in size and position, creating an abstract composition.
In the setup() function, the canvas is created with a size of 600x600, and a createCapture() function is called to create a video element that captures the user's camera input. The function specifies constraints for the video, setting the minimum and maximum width and height to 600 pixels. Once the stream is obtained, the load variable is set to false.
In the draw() function, the loadPixels() function is called on the video capture and the canvas to prepare them for pixel manipulation. The background is then set to light grey. The if statement checks if the load variable is false, and if so, loops through the pixels of the video capture and creates a series of rectangles whose colour and size are based on the corresponding pixel's colour value.
The map() function is used to convert the colour value to a size value that ranges from 12 to 3. A semi-transparent black rectangle is then drawn over the canvas using push() and pop() functions to create a darkening effect.
Finally, the copy() function is used to paste five rectangular sections from the captured video onto the canvas, with the specified dimensions and positions. A grey filter is applied to the entire canvas at the end of the draw() function.
