Design and Concept
Over the first few weeks of this class and our class projects, I’ve found myself leaning towards pieces that would work well in an art installation setting ( or at least I think so ), ones that don’t require much user interaction but is just pleasant to look at.
For my midterm, I wanted to do something similar, but at the same time incorporating some more interaction in it while retaining the essence of being an ‘installation piece’ . I was inspired by Chris Milk’s “The Treachery of Sanctuary”, Romy Achituv & Camille Utterback’s “Text Rain”, and more than the others, Scott Snibbe’s “Deep Walls”. I loved the concept of leaving behind little snippets of yourself, seeing the snippets left behind by other people, and the idea that for every memory that is added, a memory is lost.
Picture of Scott Snibbe’s “Deep Walls”
For my midterm project, I’d like to do something similar with a camera and a keyboard. On the screen, there will be a few black and white photo threshold’d to be fully black or white so that the person is not identifiable, along with some text that was left behind by that person. The next viewer will be given one of a few prompts, such as “What is your favorite memory?” , “Who do you miss the most?”, “What are you looking forward to?”, and the viewer can type their answers with the keyboard while the camera takes a photo of them without a prompt. Their memory and photo will be left on the screen, replacing one of the existing ‘memories’, causing it to be lost forever.
I’ve been thinking about the concept of memory for a while, and I thought that this will be a good project to incorporate my thoughts into a physical piece. The biggest challenge for this project I think will be getting the camera and photo-taking to work with Processing, and doing so in a meaningful way. I would also have to think of some good prompts for the piece, as some prompts would be too simple, while having them be too complicated might discourage viewers from typing.