You know Winter is officially here when the fleece blanket is dug out from the back of the cupboard and your daily intake of tea and chocolate biscuits increases. Let’s be grateful for Kit Kat’s and Tetley tea

I like this…

It is interesting that much of the mainstream press have left their historical medium behind for their online coverage, as each have chosen the format which is best for a story.

The Berlin Twitterwall supported by Reporters without Borders displays Twitter messages which are using the hashtag #fotw on a virtual East Side Gallery. The aim of the project is to share thoughts on the fall of the wall as well as to focus on “which walls still have to come down to make our wold a better place”. The wall currently hosts 6.015 tweets!!

Most users seem to be posting the link to the virtual Berlin wall and not their thoughts and feelings which is a shame as the content is not that interesting but I really like the design and concept. It has the talk-ability factor and seems to be appearing in many different tweets today on a global scale. The use of mobile media and social platforms to cover today’s celebration demonstrates the new innovative possibilities available within journalism.

I am keen to kick start a career in online content creation after a fantastic and rewarding placement year in London at Virgin Radio. Finding my dream job is proving to be somewhat of a challenge - no surprise there. I am keeping my options open and have recently been offered a freelance contract back at the university to deliver all Digital Art and Technology workshops for Aimhigher.

My other passion is for creative learning and with a broad range of experiences working with young people i would be foolish to not explore possible opportunities. On that note it would be a good time to mention my recent interview at TR2 based in Plymouth for the role of a Creative Learning Assistant. I find out next week…although it is not my first preference it would be my ‘get out of jail’ card from my current pocket money job.

So that’s the update. I haven’t decided yet how i would like my site to progress, it currently hosts all my research and findings for what was my undergraduate study which may one day be of use again…or not. I plan to continue to blog and hopefully build up an archive of writing and findings to be used as part of my portfolio. Wish me luck..

MirroID is an installation piece, which aims to interact with those who look into the ‘mirror’. Inspired by the work of Francis Galton it uses real time face recognition and the process of composite photography to generate a snapshot of identity within a public space.

The project itself is an experiment, which aims to investigate the relationship between the camera, reflection and identity. The experience of looking into the ‘mirror’ aims to raise social and cultural questions surrounding the use of facial recognition technologies within public spaces.

In case you are wondering - The left hand side of the screen is the live web cam feed and the right is the composite snapshot.

Realtime Face Detection in Flash from squidder on Vimeo

You can play here: http://robmccardle.glueserv.co.uk/facecam/v1/

Source code thanks to Squidder: http://www.squidder.com/2009/02/26/realtime-face-detection-in-flash/

This got me thinking about how these pictures may be composited on top of one another. I took a few images from the FlickrBooth set on Flickr and then played with them in Photoshop using the hard light blend mode to get an idea of what it may look like. I cropped each photo similar to how the recognition works and made then all the same size.

The last couple of days have been tough, with lots of help from Kseniya I have managed to learn some AS3. My project now:

1. Pulls in a live web cam feed to the stage.

2. Detects motion.

3. If motion is detected it takes a snapshot.

4. It then applies BlendMode.HARDLIGHT to the captured bitmap. This is so the snapshots can be layered to create a time-based image.

5. An array determines how many are layered at one time. I have currently set it to three.

I now have different variables - tolerance, filters and number of bitmaps - to experiment with. The foundations seem to be in place but it’s not quite complete.

Below is “Big Brother (Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, Khomeini, 1983″.

Nancy Burson’s pictures are products of that mentality. And they show it: they show what sort of world will result from that mentality: a world of chimaeras.

The heart desires something: for example, an androgynous human being, or an accomplished Big Brother, or a perfect female beauty. Such a desire may be called a ‹program.› In order to realize such a program in the form of an image, various available photographs should be chosen. [...in this case] the photos of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao and Khomeini. [...] Each of these photos is to be calculated: dissected into very small squares called ‹pixels.› These calculations are to be fed into a computer, which is then instructed to compute the desired image from the pixels according to the program called ‹desire.› The result will be Burson’s photos of chimaeras.

Link: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/big-brother/

My original idea was to experiment with a mirror and hide a web cam behind it. I wanted to capture snapshots of the people who looked into the mirror and then composite them on top of each other to create a time based image. This would represent the average user of the public space, similar to the work of Francis Galton.

Francis Galton worked with the process of composite photography to verify and illustrate his study of heredity. This involved exposing an arbitrary number of individual portraits of chosen groups of people on a photographic plate, with the respective exposure time for each image made in relation to the number of used portraits. The overlapping caused the subjects’ individual physiognomic qualities to vanish and accentuated common characteristics of the chosen group.

Francis Galton, Composite-Fotografie

The composite process resulted in producing a slightly blurred image, which, as Galton wrote, «portrayed no specific type of person, but rather an imaginary figure endowed with the average characteristics of a specific group of people. [...] [This] represents the portrait of a type and not of an individual.» Galton’s process was founded on the physiognomic idea that a person’s character and potential could be established through appearance alone. The example shown here – the synthesis of the ‹epitomic Jew,› and the intensification of an archive to a single image – demonstrates the most dangerous effects that combining eugenics with composite photography produces.

Link: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/composite-fotografie/

I am really keen on composite photography because of the element of time and the relationship it has with portraiture from the work developed by Galton. I had come across his work whilst researching for my recent paper but did not find any relevance to my work at the time. I am keen to find other projects that use a similar process. Since 1877 technologies have developed rapidly therefore it is not going to be surprising to find computer generated composite imagery. This is something i aim to achieve with the use of a web cam.