Simran Jagnik ->

Project #8 Experimental Camera

Code of the sketch

Description

For this assignment, we design and code an experimental camera that expresses a novel way of capturing a body, a place, or an object. Conventional cameras imitate the resolution, depth of field, and color 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. My three ideas for making this camera were:

  1. 1.Pointilism in images captured; basically turning a capture into a painting that looks like a watercolor flowly wavy painting.
  2. 2.Digital Photobooth; during Covid I've been seeing my friend online and I miss making memories with them so I wanted to make a digital photobooth to take online captures.
  3. 3.Color Blind filters; it relates to my major studio project so diving deep into it to understand the filters applied on cameras.

I went ahead with both a Digital Photobooth and Color Blind filter because I was loving working with the camera and pixels. What does it mean to design a camera that is meant to capture a specific person, place, or object? How might we document our domestic life while we self-quarantine? Has the selfie culture and photography carried on different meanings since the start of the pandemic? How can camera filters change the way we perceive ourselves and the others? Make an intentional choice on the context your camera should be used in. Document your camera set up and a series of images you take with the camera. You are expected to utilize createCapture() and array in your camera design.

Design Process

I started with messing with pixel arrays of camera captures, I made the first idea and loved how it looked but I wasn't able to implement a watercolor effect to it so I stopped there and went to designing a digital photobooth. Youtube tutorial by Coding Train really helped me do this quickly and I was able to add colors as tints to visualise the photobooth in various fun formats. I also wanted to try implementing my Color Blind Filters, because they relate to my Major Studio project around making color blind space in a game format. I tried to change the RGB values by myself but it didn't look right so I googled the maths behind the color pixel manipulation and retried. When it finally worked out I implemented two more modes of color blindness.

Code of the sketch Some screenshots for both Camers:

Reflection

I found it pretty useful to learn the maths behind the color blind filters. I love making filters in general and doing it practically for this assignment was a delight. I don't really like to take pictures and I'm pretty camera conscious so this camera experiment made me more comfortable looking at myself. I also realised how I don't like that the camera doesn't ask for permission to capture the pictures and makes me uncomfortable about how it might be tracking other things without my consent even though it is not.