image to text

The Drawing from Life installation was developed as a commission for the ‘Genomic Revolution’ show at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The exhibit opened in May 2001 and ran through January 1, 2002. In this piece viewers see a live video of themselves composed completely from the letters ‘ATGC’—the letters symbolizing the 4 proteins of DNA. This piece appears in the last room of the exhibit on the human genome and helps raise questions for visitors ‘am I more than my DNA’? ‘Does my DNA define me?’ The light or dark value of each letter is determined by the light or dark value in the incoming video, but the characters themselves change randomly—hinting at the vitality and chaos of life itself.

(Source: Artist's description at project site)

The Composition installation turns live video of participants in an installation space into imagery completely composed of text. Participants in the installation interact with a live projected version of themselves where a real-time video image of themselves is literally ‘composed’ out of text characters. Composition examines how areas of an image can carry multiple weights—their symbolic value as text characters, and their light or dark value as part of the overall composition.

 (Artist's description at project site)

Talking Cure is an installation that includes live video processing, speech recognition, and a dynamically composed sound environment. It is about seeing, writing, and speaking — about word pictures, the gaze, and cure. It works with the story of Anna O, the patient of Joseph Breuer's who gave to him and Freud the concept of the "talking cure" as well as the word pictures to substantiate it. The reader enters a space with a projection surface at one end and a high-backed chair, facing it, at another. In front of the chair are a video camera and microphone. The video camera's image of the person in the chair is displayed, as text, on the screen. This "word picture" display is formed by reducing the live image to three colors, and then using these colors to determine the mixture between three color-coded layers of text. One of these layers is from Joseph Breuer's case study of Anna O. Another layer of text consists of the words "to torment" repeated — one of the few direct quotations attributed to Anna in the case study. The third layer of text, which becomes visible only when a person is in the chair, reworks Anna's snake hallucinations through the story of the Gorgon Medusa, reconfiguring the analytic gaze. Speaking into the microphone triggers a speech-to-text engine that replaces Anna's words with what it (mis)understands the participant to have said. What is said into the microphone is also recorded, and becomes part of a sound environment that includes recordings of Breuer's words, Anna's words, our words, and all that has been spoken over the length of the installation. Others in the space observe the person in the chair through word pictures on the screen. Readers move their bodies at first to create visual effects, and then to achieve textual ones, creating new reading experiences for themselves and others in the room. Movements range from slowly moving an extended arm in order to recreate left-to-right reading, to head or hand rotation seeking evocative neologisms at the mobile textual borders within the image. The video processing technique was created by Utterback, and has been exhibited separately as Written Forms. The sound environment was designed and implemented by Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin implemented the speech-to-text. Talking Cure was first presented at the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization symposium at UCLA. I have also presented it as a performance/reading, cycling verbally between the layers of text while my image is projected as a different textual mixture on a screen.

(Source: Author's website.)

"Text Rain is an interactive installation in which participants use the familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what seems magical—to lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist. In the Text Rain installation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling letters. Like rain or snow, the letters appears to land on participants’ heads and arms. The letters respond to the participants’ motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The falling text will ‘land’ on anything darker than a certain threshold, and ‘fall’ whenever that obstacle is removed. If a participant accumulates enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can sometimes catch an entire word, or even a phrase. The falling letters are not random, but form lines of a poem about bodies and language. ‘Reading’ the phrases in the Text Rain installation becomes a physical as well as a cerebral endeavor."

(Source: http://camilleutterback.com/projects/text-rain/)