Electronic Superhighway was an exhibition held at Whitechapel Gallery from January - May 2016.
It brought together over 100 works to show the impact of computer and internet technologies featuring artists from the mid sixties to today.
Nam June Paik’s work Internet Dream was a video sculpture made up of different sized monitors. Considered the father of video art Paik pioneered the use of televisual electronic media in art.
I really like the vividness of Paik's work and her relationship with monitors and video through her work. The way this work in particular is displayed really interested me and I considered it as an inspiration in the direction I wished my work would take.
Here I took my video compilation of the monitors in alien and brought it into processing - I wanted to experiment with focal points and repetition of these screens over and over reminiscent of Andreas Refsgaard's work Erasing/Enhancing Essentials. I enjoyed the layering of lighting from the screens and liked how it enhanced there details.
"When a human eye looks at an image, it quickly focuses on dominant parts of the scene, commonly known as a visual saliency. In other words, visual saliency refers to a set of cognitive procedures that select relevant information and filter out irrelevant information from cluttered visual scenes.
Erasing/Enhancing Essentials is an ongoing project of mine that investigates essence in images by letting algorithms identify, enhance and erase areas of images that are of the most visual importance. The project uses a Contextual Encoder-Decoder Network for Visual Saliency Prediction. When exposed to a new image the network creates a heat map which highlights the parts of the image most likely to attract the visual attention of a person."
I began experimenting with different blend modes in processing to vary the outcomes I had and allow me to begin to consider taking this work further.
Below is a short video documentation of a short piece of code I wrote that allows you to draw a box from the video playing and drag it to create a draw/stretch effect of the images. It was interesting being a manual approach and down to the user to find interesting elements within these screens. I also thought it may allow the user to consider them more by being an interactive piece.
Moving on from this I didn't really know how to involve this piece in a interactive sphere with being at home - I had a lot of problems with processing using my webcam and had tried a multitude of fixes I'd read on forums which didn't seem to work. I eventually gave up hope that I would get this to work so turned to P5.js web editor.
Very similar to processing I found it reasonably straight forward to familiarise myself with p5 and utilise its powerful tools.
Whilst doing this I considered the idea of being present as a film plays and if we are not present does the reality of the film exist.
I tool used commonly in film to emphasise a sense of reflection or initiate that we the viewer are viewing the film through someone else's gaze.
Eyes are a very personalised feature and impactful when used in close up sequences.
I collected an array of eye closeups in different films as seen above and began to think about creating a sketch that would only play the clips whilst you looked at the screen.
Below is a video of me testing this piece of work - I felt like this was meant to be a short outcome for me and a way to experiment with an interactive element of showing film. I wanted to create something that symbolised reflection through this form of eye contact.
Test here on p5 web!
I developed it into a slightly more humerous piece whilst I was going through a bit of a dry spell creatively which you can see below.
My test for this on p5 wasn't didn't work that well in terms of scaling so I turned to sparkAR as I had used this outcome previously but wanted to revisit it again to see what new tools it had to offer.
P5 test here!
This was a short branch of work that in the future I would like to revisit but I felt this was to big an area to keep exploring for the meantime.