M_M_ is a mirror installation by Matteo Peterlini similar to a few I’ve posted about here before such as Miroir Aux Silhouettes, a_mirror, MirrorSpace, Reface [Portrait Sequencer]. Specific details are a bit vague on this one as the description on the artists site is only in Italian and I can’t get a decent enough translation. Mixing the image of the user with symbols of Hollywood cinema:

M_M _ redesigns our relationship between the truth and the indelible image of myths through one mirror. The mirror, constructed here with a webcam, a monitor is after all the encounter point. But rather than to an instrument of fusion between truth and symbol it appeals to to think to me next to this job like to a rivelatrice work, that is that us door one detection of the conflict between extraordinary daily paper and, between human and myth, moment and infinite.

Reface [Portrait Sequencer] (images above and video below) by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman is an interactive installation which cuts up and recombines users faces:

Reface uses face-tracking techniques to allow automatic alignment and segmentation of its participants’ faces. As a result, visitors to the project can move around freely in front of the display without worrying about lining up their face for the system’s camera. The video clips recorded by the project are “edited” by the participants’ own eye blinks. Blinking also triggers the display to advance to the next set of face combinations.

Originally seen on Digital Experience.

Something I missed in London on the 18/04/08 - 20/04/08 which I would have liked to have seen was the O2 Memory Project (image above), an outdoor installation created by Jason Bruges Studio. The work is a ploy to advertise the launch of O2’s new social networking initiative, Bluebook, however is an interesting (albeit simple) idea based around how people use picture messaging and what is supposedly networked collective mass memory. It’s interesting how photography, and here the works idea is based on this assumption, has begun to completely shape our idea of memories. A photograph is a memory and in turn our memories become photographic in nature. The work is:

designed to investigate how we capture and store digital memories. Reminiscent of Victorian cycloramas, the unit is a 4mhigh cylinder with 11 cameras placed around its perimeter which, Bruges says, ‘looks like a clock in plan’.

Here’s how it works:

Each camera takes a picture in sequence every five seconds, creating a 360-degree digital panorama of the outside location every minute. These images appear on giant screens in the structure’s interior…By standing in the centre of the installation, a person can view what is happening in the present, but by moving forward towards the screens he or she can choose to move back in time, and see what was happening in the morning.

The work will tour England and Scotland for the rest of the month and into May. Once finished it will return to London to the O2 venue in Greenwich, a fitting location seeing as if I remember correctly there is a small Victorian cyclorama close by. If you can’t get to any of the venues then the website (image above) is a pretty good substitute and a video explaining and demonstrating the work can be seen on the BBC News website.

Originally seen on Pixelsumo.

Fitting in with the surveillance theme in the last few posts but also some older work discussed here (World Bench, Miroir Aux Silhouettes, Intimate Transactions and the work of Paul Sermon), Worldview allows users to engage with both the spaces around them, subsequent users to the installation and users interacting with a similar installation elsewhere. The installation

has two faces: a “mirror” side that encourages people to ‘play’ and a “window” side that connects in realtime to Worldview locations in other cities around the planet.

It raises three questions:

what would be the experience of encountering the similarities and differences of people and places around the world? What would be the impact on the urban context of placing and linking these devices? And finally, is it possible to capture a sense of “place” in a way that a visitor will find delightful and engaging?

SurveillanceSaver (images above), one of the links listed at the bottom of 2.4Ghz which I posted about yesterday, is a screen saver which randomly loads a video stream from one of over 1000 webcams world wide.

The project started as an experiment within my dissertation about a “Reality Filtering System” at Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics. While searching for “remote eyes” a DIGG article about finding Axis network cameras via Google led to the quick development of a simple OS X screen saver showing that images [sic] randomly. The results were impressive and addictive. The screen saver showed live images of streets and buildings but also surprising images of russian [sic] internet cafes, hotel lobbies, server rooms, barns with little pigs, etc. It came out that the images of a hundreds of these surveillance cameras were not protected accidently [sic].