ABSTRACT
Co-Individuality focuses on the concept of the individual. I investigate a person’s identity, and their relationship with other identities when they feel isolated. I started by thinking about political situation that is creating a fracture in relationships between people.
The fracture between Spain & Catalonia is affecting daily life, and generating anxiety and uncertainty for most of the population. Although this instance of isolation emerges from a political situation, I don’t want to focus on the conflict. Instead, I want to approach my project from the point of view of a culturally uprooted person.
My goal is to answer one question: is technology able to represent what happens in the liminal space of communication across a border.
This liminal space is where everything is possible: what cannot be real in the current political situation can be real in this space. My answer is creating a shared identity through a telematics experience, connecting two instances of the same OpenFrameworks application using TCP protocol.
TECHNIQUE: SLIT-SCAN
Exploration of the technique as a self-portrait . My own work using SlitScan technique in OpenFrameworks.
INSTALLATION
The complete set of the installation consist on two different laptops mirroring the image on an external camera and webcam that will be used as a support and as well as a visual clue for the user.
PROCESS
My technical prototyping was another key stone of the project. Coming from a non-coding background I encountered numerous challenges. It took me a while to understand that I should solve one problem at a time.
My first step was working on the visual different explorations while I was coding that on open frameworks. My main trouble here was to sync both slitScan systems (two different cameras with different frame-rates).
My second step was trying to create the network using ofxNetwork addon and TCP protocol. As starting point I was going to create system working locally on my computer and progressively going to an external connection.
Connecting TCP instances together was not the most difficult part. What it became challenging was sending huge amount of data and receive that as ordered packets in order to construct again the image from the data received.
As I was going to send live video but I wanted to use slitScan in the other end, I decided to send line by line. This ended up being complex, and incomprehensibly frustrating because I was too close but to far at the same time to make it work properly. I was having problems myself to allow the own communication that I was trying to establish.
Lastly, I allowed a tactile intervention in which users can move the scene in a three-dimensional space to see the two layers generated by each space. I would like to point out, that I increased this distance on purpose to create this space generated between the two cities.
To conclude, I want to add that this personal exploration, made me wonder a lot of the ideas that I started with, even more. Also, this installation made push myself to an area really out my comfort zone, where my creative skills where not needed anymore and I needed to feel like a coder, think as a developer, and solve problems as a designer.
In a future iteration, I would like to keep working on the collaborative tridimensional virtual spaces generated by using a mesh on OpenFrameworks that could by modified at any time to create stunning visualisations.