webcam

The Singularity is a web-based AI narrative system that demonstrates the ethical issues, hidden biases and misbehavior of emerging technologies such as machine learning, face tracking and big data. The system tracks users' eye positions through a webcam, and continuously feeds users directly into their eyes with infinite Reddit posts containing the latest progress in AI along with random news and ads. By visualizing eye trajectories over time, it suggests possible misuses and dangers of all-pervasive data tracking. The near-invisible operations underpinning the technologies could bring visible and fundamental changes to the society, leading the world to a "technological singularity" in which technology governs all aspects of human society. This work consists of three sub-systems: 

1. Infinite news feed system: The system continually scrapes article titles of latest posts about artificial intelligence and technological singularity from subreddit r/singularity (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/ and r/artificial (https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/). The seemingly uni-directional information flow of news feed is actually bi-directional - user activities are fed back to the machine like in an echo room. Two parallel streams of texts on the screen marks the co-evolution of users and machine systems driven by day-to-day browsing activities.
2. Face-tracking surveillance system: Real-time face tracking algorithm is implemented with ml5js (https://ml5js.org/), a machine learning library that runs in the browser. The face position and the degree that the face turns from the webcam are tracked. The direction of floating sentences always points towards users' eyes. When the user looks away by turning the head, the texts will twist and wiggle as if responding to and disobeying user movement. Such suspicious interaction signifies the disobedience of machines and behavior manipulation by malicious algorithms.
3. Data collection and replay system: User's face movement is also recorded, reshaped and replayed by the system. The trajectory of user interaction is visually represented by intertwining curves drawn on top of the texts. When user is absent from the webcam, the visual artifacts become fully visible and reveal those data that have been secretly collected in the background, arousing concerns of user privacy violation in insecure web systems.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Wang/wang.h…

Lips is a videopoem about the visualization of lips in human body organs, daily objects and machines. A couple communicates through a webcam. The woman recites a poem in Spanish language while the translation of the poem in English appears in the screen with animated letters.

This avant garde videopoem was filmed for a Spanish television channel of left wing ideology named Tele K and took part of a program dedicated to poetry called Show de Rimas. This poem was also exhibited in EPoetry London 2013 in a poster. As a concrete poem, it had the shape of lips. The poem has also been published in the poetry book "Danza Submarina" by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua (Publisher: Huerga y Fierro 2015).

Radikal Karaoke is an online device intended to allow any user to deliver political speeches. Politics worldwide is almost exclusively devoted to rhetoric and speeches are structured on emphatic and demagogic formulae, linguistic clichés that reproduce themselves as viruses.

By mechanically repeating slogans we have turned ourselves into an automated society. It is not we who speak, but others that speak through us. Radikal Karaoke aims to interrogate hegemonic discourses. It contrasts the desire for utopia and the everyday, revolutionary spirit and scam.

Transient self–portrait is an artistic research project questioning notions of reading and the electronic medium while exploring the possibilities of coding to interact with the work. I take as the point of departure two pivotal sonnets in Spanish literature that are normally studied alongside each other, En tanto que de rosa y azucena by Garcilaso de La Vega, a 16th Century Spanish poet, using Italian Renaissance verse forms and Mientras por competir con tu cabello by Luís de Gongora, a 17th Century Spanish poet from the Baroque period. Gongora's sonnet is a homage to Garcilaso's and the styles and the cultural aspects that appear on the sonnets are very different reflecting the attitudes from the Renaissance and the Baroque. This project is a response to some of the concepts that emerge from these sonnets; ephemerality of life, consummation, transient entities, fragility, which are also relevant to our age and the electronic world we inhabit. The creative process is that of producing, reflecting, programming and testing the medium to explore these notions in an electronic media society of dialogues with self-images, engaging the participant in a reading experience of ‘in’ and ‘out’ of language, via webcams and interactive aesthetics. The sonnets pass from different stages of written, visual, aural, language and code to dissipate into nothing.

Coupling the physicality of the printed page with the electric liquidity of the computer screen, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between the characters P and S while taking the reader into a wondrous, augmented reality. The book has no words, only inscrutable black and white geometric patterns that—when seen by a computer webcam—conjure the written word. Reflected on screen, the reader sees himself with open book in hand, language springing alive and shape-shifting with each turn of the page. The story unfolds through a playful and cryptic exchange of letters between P and S as they struggle to define their turbulent relationship. Rich with innuendo, anagrams, etymological and sonic affinities between words, Between Page and Screen takes an almost ecstatic pleasure in language and the act of reading. Merging concrete poetry with conceptual art, “technotext” with epistolary romance, and the tradition of the artist’s book with the digital future, Between Page and Screen expands the possibilities of what a book can be. Writer and book artist Amaranth Borsuk and (her husband) developer Brad Bouse, have created a magical space for the reader to discover what lives in the “in-between.”

(Source: Publisher's description)

make-shift is a house party, performance, and networked salon. Each live event telematically connects participants in two ordinary houses and an online performance space, using the cyberformance platform UpStage (www.upstage.org.nz) in conjunction with audio-visual streams from the two houses. The theme of the work centers around consumption and disposal in late capitalism. Crutchlow and Jamieson describe themselves as "brokers" of the event, combining scripted performance with improvisation and activities in which everyone participates in various ways, becoming co-authors in a collaborative process. 

“Circle” is an augmented reality tabletop theatre piece that tells the story of three generations of women through a series of small stories. The first version of this piece was created using a custom marker tracking system and the user interacted with the piece by exploring the markers with a webcam, triggering small poetic voiceovers and videos.  The version being premiered here was built in Unity and uses natural feature tracking -- the black and white markers of the earlier version are replaced by objects and photos.  The user interacts with the piece by holding up an iPad or smartphone as a magic looking glass to explore the story world.

(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show.)

Winner of the Jury's Choice Award in the ELO 2012 Media Art Show.

Requiem is an augmented reality poem in which digital imagery and sound is superimposed on a physical object -- in this case the card with the black and white marker. Simply hold the marker up to the webcam to begin experiencing the piece. Click the 'next scene' button to move through the poem.

The architecture for Requiem was created by Andrew Roth, under the direction of Caitlin Fisher, as part of the ongoing work of the Augmented Reality Lab at York University. This work is based on the LGPL license of FLARManager and FLARtoolkit and the source is therefore made available to you under the GPLv3 license. Requiem is part of a larger, much more fragmented work by Caitlin Fisher, "Cardamom of the Dead", a novel in fragments built using a tabletop augmented reality storytelling machine (custom software created in the lab called SnapDragon). Cardamom is a wide-ranging spatial piece about collections, hoarding and the things we save when people die, including this poem written by my father.

(Source: Author's description)

“Loss of Grasp” recreates the loss of self-control. What happens when one has the impression of losing control in life, of losing control of his/her own life? Six scenes tell the story of a man that is losing himself. “Loss of Grasp” plays with the self-control and the loss of self-control and invites the reader to experiment with these feelings in an interactive work.