My Journal

Studio

DOCUMENTATION SEM 2

The first two weeks of the second semester is just figuring out how we are going to continue with our 

our project. We talked to a few lectures to helps us with some ideas and feed back on how we can approach our project. On the second week of the semester me and Rebecca went for a walk along Queen Street to take photos of people without the people knowing as if we are "stealing their souls".

One of things we noticed was that every person still looks at the camera for a quick second and then look away as if they knew that they photos are being taken (the flash was off so that people won't know their photos are being taken).

After taking the photos, we collage every images to create a new digital soul as a test. I did an exquisite corpse collaging style while Rebecca did a different one

I the tried to make a sound out of it to to try to somehow metaphorically capture the digital soul of an image we use audacity to translate the image into sound and the sound that the images make sound really interesting.

We then implemented the idea of collaging section to max map using different time interval but it seems so simple and not enough. So we tried a new idea by using the eyes as the eyes from the photos that we have taken draw some attention to us. We took the eyes off from them and after taking the eyes off, we realize that without the eyes it look like they are blank or something is missing from them.

We then implemented the eyes to try to put a sound as a test by picking up colors or by encoding the color with its sound perspective.

When Rebecca showed me how much information she has on the internet I tried to look for myself, maybe I could create a digital soul that represents me. I could not really find any.

It is hard that every idea we test there is always something lacking and we could not point it out. Instead of narrowing down our ideas, we are branching off to different and new ideas.

I looked at Rebecca Jury's name on google image and there are quite a few rebecca jury so I decided to copy their photos and try to create a digital soul for them that represents all the rebecca jurys

I've used photoshop and layer all the faces and merge it all together to create a new digital soul for all the rebecca jury

I've used overlay on every photo and tried to do two different order to see if there is a difference between the rebecca jury.

This idea have lead me to making an installation of merged faces. the idea was based on the youtube video Face of humanity, the idea that the end result of the merged faces of different people in their different ethnicity and culture is really interesting. I had an idea of creating a changing representation of the digital soul, a collective images of every person that have taken their photos and merge it into one. I chose it to be changing as it also represents every information that we put online as our "digital soul" and for every information that we put, they all do not stay the same. Over the years new information are added to us: new school, new place, new work , new relationship status, new achievements, etc.. Also, over the years our face matures over the time and every photos that we put of ourselves change. 

I've used the rebecca jury as a test of this idea using processing:

I've tried using different layering techniques to see what works best. I somehow struggle doing a live feed of it using a camera where whenever the photo is taken it just keep adding to the previous one. Instead, the photos just keep adding onto one file.

We've just had our final formative presentation and some tutors couldn't quite grasp the idea of our representation of digital soul. it still confuses people and whenever people get confuse about it we kind of doubt ourselves. It was however interesting at how rob like the idea of bringing the digital representation of the digital soul to the physical representation based on rebecca's digital self portrait and we liked that idea too so we tried to recreate the Rebecca Jurys by layering out every images using a clear sheet and framing it. It is really interesting how different it looked and how realistic it feels.