silicone_04

Fourth attempt. Softer silicone with styrofoam balls inside, turned out the best so far. Thickness ended up being a little bit too thin in the bottom / entry of the mold (holes in the surface).

Put styrofoam balls inside the object and pulled from the outside. The distortion is pretty wide and not as localised as I hoped, however, securing the object more tightly could be a way to solve this or making a different model that has little knobs that could be pulled.

Unfortunately the styrofoam balls easily break. I think i need something else to put inside that i can use to distort the object. The wire basically cuts through it. Not having an object inside will tear the silicone, I need something blunt / round to pull it from the inside.

I should also experiment with different colors / shapes for the object.

silicone_02 & silicone_03

Put little needles into styrofoam balls, the same size used to make the mold. With this i can keep them in the middle of the mold and let the silicone form a layer around it. However, it seems the silicone I bought is way too hard and doesn't really have any elasticity at all (cracks easily).

Used much softer silicone this time. The object needs to be hollow as the thread will just cut through it if I try to pull it. As a result i need to be able to put an object inside and pull this from the outside.

Used too much silicone and I didn't move the mold enough while it was curing. As a result it has big lumps inside, while other areas only have a thin layer. Will try next to cast it with styrofam balls inside the mold like the previous experiment.

Mold_02

Second attempt at making a mold. Had a scale this time, but still i can't seem to get the measurements right. Had way too much in the first side of the mold and barely enough on the other side.

The first cast of the silicone was a failure. I applied a thin layer on each side of the mold with some extra around the endges to hopefully connect it. It cured for 12 hours, where I for the first few constantly shifted it around to make sure it didn't all gather in the bottom. This ended up happening either way. There was a thin layer around the whole thing. But it just collapsed on itself when i opened it. The silicone was also super sticky as I probably opened it too early.

Problem with this one is that it will be hard to keep the model in the center. Also i think maybe the silicone wall will be too thick. Another problem is that the silicone is super sticky, as a result getting it off from the mold and object will be difficult.

Mold_01

I remember last time that the motors where not strong enough to pull it. This may be partly cause of the motor itself but also partly cause of the spool was made out of plywood. I guess a servo motor would be a better choice.

I can buy a 30x30 aquarium, however should i maybe make one instead? Making would give me more choice in terms of how to place motors / sensors?

This first mold was a failure. I thought I would start with a simple model, similar to the one from the previous experiment, just to try making a mold. The clay model ended up cracking. Also i had way too much space around the object, should probably limit it to two - three cm. I did not have a scale so I ended up eye balling the measurements for the plaster and ended up with too little, not enough to cover the model.

Ideas - slow heat death / entropy

With slow heat death of the universe, the universe is constantly expanding, everything is moving away from each other / getting further away. As the expansion continues the only thing left will be “waste heat” left over from the process of the universe expanding. When we look up at the sky we will only see darkness.

In a way the slow heat death of the universe is a parallel to the case of human connection. As we seemingly become more and more connected through increasingly advanced technology we’re actually becoming more and more isolated. As technology becomes more advanced, people become more isolated. Technology has created an illusion of connectedness, when in reality we’re deprived of actual human connection. Body heat is the result of our sensory system keeping us alive. By using body heat as a data source we're redirecting it into another process. Reclaiming / redirecting the entropy of humans / living beings.

1. Continuation of intimacy without proximity. Do a bigger model, as people will approach and interact with an object differently if it is in human scale. Try to fabricate different models, mess around with different projections / feedback. I think either an object big enough to mirror a person or a group of smaller objects composited together could be nice. Make it more visually impressive.

2. Heat transformed into heat. Problem with this is that people generally don’t want to experience the heat of strangers. The Barrier of disgust. It definitely has its area of use, but not as a commercial project. High conductive heating fabric? Problem with this is latency.

3. Heat signature to produce generative shapes / visuals. All objects emit a heat signature. By taking the heat signature of a person, maybe it could be used to generate unique shapes. When we stand still, time flows freely and the model will disintegrate. But when we move, the model will regenerate again. Basically visualizes the process of entropy. I think it would be nice to either do it fragmented or more literal where the model becomes more and more isolated. A 3 - dimensional shape would be nice, but i think this maybe have to be a 2D object. Unless I maybe do it as a hologram / projection.

With a heat signature object. Each object can represent a location. E.g. one location can then gather multiple objects. It also supports the choice of using a thermal camera as a source. To differentiate living beings from moving machines - every living being has a heat signature.

4. "Quantum entangled objects". A link between objects that make them behave as one / A domino effect of objects. "Spooky action at a distance" involves a pair of particles linked by the strange quantum property of entanglement which remain intrinsically connected despite the distance between them. With this i was thinking to do first maybe a small experient to connects to simple objects together e.g. turn a wheel and another turns to the same degree.

Problem with this it lacks the "synesthesia" aspect of telepresence.

5. Biological connection. Using living beings as an interface for interaction. E.g. Venus fly trap releases an electric signal when it closes. In the distant future, there’s a high chance that we will be biologically connected to each other through technology. The Action Lab already did this experiment however.

Thermal camera overlayed with regular camera. Then each pixel in the thermal camera could be used as coordinate to distort the regular camera view?

Experiment - merge / traffic networks

The goal of this project was to explore how to merge or fuse together real time video streams. It's about exhausting a scene down to colors and movement and repurpose this into an abstract representation. When info has been stripped away, the scenes can be merged together. First two networks are both a direct representation of the flow of traffic at different locations. The third data network is an attempt at trying to merge and fuse these two together.

It's a proof of concept of trying to analyse and gather info from live streams. To develop this further i would've done this with a camera where visitors can see themselves / their surroundings being analysed and taken apart and "merged" with other locations. As this is only a proof of concept I chose to analyse an already available live stream with a steady, continuous flow of movement. The live streams are taken from spatic.go.kr

This experiment grabs two random street cams around Seoul. Traffic from each camera is analysed and the color of each car registered is extracted and displayed as a small part of an abstract network. Traffic cameras are passive and running 24 - 7. As a result it will give different results based on what time it is. The third network represents the merge of the different scenes.

Analysis of scene -> breaking down each scene -> Merge of two scenes.

In the first two "networks" the x, y - position are chosen at random, the z - position is decided by the saturation of the color. In the third network x is position is controlled by brightness, z position by saturation and y is randomly chosen.

Issues
Originally I wanted to use traffic cameras / live streams from different parts of the world, e.g. Norway and Korea, but unfortunately I couldn't find any high quality streams from Norway. As a result it uses different traffic cams around Seoul instead.

Unfortunately the tracker is not that accurate. It's using contour / difference tracking via. Open CV where it looks for pixels that differ from a set background image. As a result it will also pick up light differences such as the headlights of the car. I realised halfway through the project that a more effective / accurate approach would be to use a machine learning model with TensorFlow trained on specific scenes. If I had to redo this project I would've gone with this approach instead / Google's "Teachable Machine" project.

Another issue is how there is not a limit to the amount of vertices. Ideally it would be time based, where every x seconds a vertex is deleted from the network. This way the network would be more representative of the current traffic as for example when there is a red light, most of the vertices would be deleted before the light becomes green.

Top left - original live stream, top right - grey scale copy to threshold, bottom left - background image, bottom right - threshold that is used for tracking.