#autoselfie now with glitches

I updated the autoselfie app so that it will cause glitches on the image where you touch it. The glitches were ported from the glitchP5 processing library.

There were some interesting things I learnt about the Matrix. The ImageView will transform the bitmap you put in it. The touch events give x and y relative to the imageview not the bitmap. So how to know where to apply the glitch. Luckily the ImageView will tell you what it did to the bitmap with the getImageMatrix() call. This Matrix object contains all the translation, scale and rotation info. Luckily you don't have to decipher the matrix. You can create an inverse matrix and apply it to the bounding box of the path created by the touch events. This rectangle is then used to define the glitch area.

Get the app - see the stream

#autoselfie - the making of

Self portrait, selfie, autoportrait, autoselfie.
Self portraits are a recurring theme. I have made them in many media such as these I made in Painter in 2002.

People post selfies all over. So how can I build something that will allow me to play with self portraits on a code level. My phone can recognise faces, so what do I look like to my phone?

Ideas of protecting and revealing identity emerge. The software knows where the eyes are, people hide their eyes or reveal only their eyes.

I built #autoselfie the app to explore these ideas. I wanted to play with oauth and I wanted to integrate opencv into an app.

The users of the app become the subject of portraits. The software in the app changes the images and posts to twitter. The twitter hastag #autoselfie becomes the place where you can see where all these experiments are collected.

On the implementation side

OAuth seems simple enough when you read about it but implementing it not without it's tricks. I ended up using a Webview in the app because to use an Intent to break out and do the twitter authorisation in the browser caused backstack complications.

I used the twitter4j libraries. I am also using the opencv jars. To do this the app needs the OpenCV Manager companion app. Initially this may be a barrier but it is really convenient not to have to integrate the C++ OpenCV libraries myself, especially since Android Studio does not have NDK support.

Read the code on github.

UX

The user interface design purposefully removes control from the user. In this way the software layers, which normally recede and try to be invisible, are brought to the users' attention. Also the image is posted and the user can only view the result after it has been posted. At this point the user is confronted with the image that has become public and the recognisability of the image to humans and machines alike. In this way the user experience becomes part of the concept of the work.

Trivia and Easter eggs

At the moment the app creates images in four flavours. There will be more later. References to these can be seen in the twitter post text and in the code.

8bit Roy is a riff off Roy Lichtenstein, primary colours which I make using thresholds and sortof Ben-Day dots which I draw in only the black and red areas. How? by chasing through the pixels and drawing circles if they are black or red :)

cannyKonny is a riff off Konny. She sticks large portraits in black and white ink with red highlight on the streets in Paris. Her works are ephemeral: here today stripped away tomorrow. It uses a Canny filter to find the edges and a bitwise not to invert the colours and a splash of algorithmic red.

andAnotherOneForLuck is just that, red and pink and yellow are lucky colours some say.

noPointInHolding on is the title of a song by Alveol. I found it on a beatoracle playlist.

Get the app - see the stream

Palais de Tokyo

http://youtu.be/IiGR4vzdlUo

to see the Nouvelles Vagues series of exhibitions by young curators

more little inky self portraits

pastel

Distortions

The same advertisement in the curved metro walls create a completely different profile.

Dynamo for the second time.

Konny

Konny on the streets and sometimes it disappears. The second one in this sequence was gone the next day.

Lichtenstein and Hantaï

Two retrospectives in one afternoon at the pompidou centre.

LICHTENSTEIN 1997 Landscape with Scholar's Rock

Simon Hantaï 1958-1959 - Peinture (Ecriture Rose)  detail

auto portrait #1

This is a riff off the polyline sample in openframeworks and marks on the wall.

Mario

Pigment ink pencil

Pigment

dynamo

works that play with perception using 8 senses and how the mind and body responds to the sensations. themes: openwork, permutation, concentric/excentric, interference, immersion, distortion, tactile, grid, pulsing, abyss, force field, cloud, halo, maelstrom, uncertain space, celestial.

Start

Fear of the blank page?

modified seedSpark v1.1

I modified the seedSpark code for the birthday party of 2 friends. Guests sent me photos which I used for the floating objects. The colours were picked from the invite.

Happy mistakes #2

Reworking an old piece so I can have things in framebuffers and use newer libraries. Not what I wanted exactly yet but some interesing artifacts.

layeredConnections - this is what it looked like for me

The test of the remote WJ-S software system on 19 March 2013. Here is my desktop. You can see the mixer, the playlist and the skype video call and text chat.  The stream was also available but for the set I was worried about bandwith lags so I switched it off.

Anne was the human interface coordinating the starts and stops of sets. Software by James coordinated the tech side of the experience. I had no software glitches.

I experienced the narrowness of the bandwidth pipe intensely, the mediated blocky-ness, sound distortion, pops squeaks, the nervous feeling that if I am disconnected then the event is there, but connection only in my imagination, the interpolation by my one interpretation to skip over the technology burrs. At the same time the feeling of amazement that people from different physical locations can control pixels and speakers in a space in Paris.

Frame from Sakrowski's set.

Thanks to Anne and James. Thanks to Fletcher for music.

layeredConnections - testing the new version of the WJ-S mixer

Preparing a playlist for the test session this weekend on the new version of the WJ-S mixer with Anne and James. How does it work? There are computers at the venue connected to screens and also connected to the internet. I make up a play list of url's. I log into the computer at the venue and control which url is displayed on the multiple screens remotely.  

 The bits I am putting together I call layeredConnections and it is based on the following ideas:

•  This phrase 

networks of susceptible activity, opaque zones of nonknowledge

 which I am pulling out of context from Matthew Fuller's book Evil Media.

 Also some ideas that have surfaced and coalesced.

• sometimes software logic felts together. 
• sometimes entropy knits/knots physical wires together. 
• sometimes meanings and intentions layer and weave into new meanings.
• sometimes sound frequencies mat together in a thick layer of interference. 
• sometimes lines hatch and cross creating the illusion of another dimension.