Narcissist Camera

embeded p5 sketch didn't work so here is my code

Design Process

For this project, I decided to make a camera that sees the world in a style similar to this drawing that I did. This drawing captures pretty well my personal aesthetics and style preferences. In my drawings, I like using perfectly saturated complementary colors to capture figures in their intimate space in a highly abstract and sometimes distorted form. I think this project would be a great opportunity to expand my style from still images to videos. I choose my personal default palette for all the color choices and layer up contrasting colors to draw all the pixels. Ideally, inspired by this tutorial , I wanted to use curves instead of dots and squares. Yet after spending a long time trying to make the curves show up at the right place, I still didn't get it to work. I also wish I could find a way to make this bigger so that it would be higher resolution. These images look very different depending on how zoomed in they are. The more it is zoomed in, the more vibrant it appears. Since all the pixels are combined by two different shapes in different colors overlapping. When zoomed in, one can see such details clearly. However, when the images are compressed to a very small scale, such details are indiscernible and the colors appear darker, almost like what happens when one mixes those two colors.

This color palette has much personal meaning to me. It is inspired by my college time living in a 150-year-old house in Berkeley. I lived with my best friend, and we two creatives filled our apartment with our art junk, cheap ornaments we bought from all kinds of places, vintage furnitures that we picked from street, posters I printed from Berkeley's photo lab. I owned many different types of ambience lights and candles. A lot of times, we just lay on the floor among all the art junk we have hoarded, very drunk and high, watching the colorful lights and candle lights spinning and flickering. That place to me is extremely colorful, with infinite interesting details to scrutinize. And this color palette conveys that ambience to me the most accurately. I also want this project is to be seen as a video camera. Because when it is a moving footage, the image flickers and moves, which is lost in the still photos.

Reflection

This is my favorite project from this class. Yet my technical skills are still very limited. I hope in the future, when I gain more training and become better at coding, I will come back to this project and actually take it to the level that I want it to be. This project may serve as a mini prototype for that future project.