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October 04, 2003
15 Mins Of Fame
I've always been fascinated by the application of technology to everyday life, and even more astounded by the ways artists have been able quietly inject technology into pieces without others noticing. When Dr. Franc Solina was passing through, it was with great interest that I stopped in to hear his lecture on "15 Seconds of Fame", the process of integrating art and technology in a real-time tribute to Andy Warhol.
The project title itself is a play on words to a statement that Andy Warhol created ("In the future everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame"). Dr. Solina's group mounted an LCD screen into a picture frame, positioned a camera above, snapped photos every 15 seconds, and then displayed them on the screen itself after some "pop art" processing ala a Warhol portrait. Sounds simple, right?
The challenge became ensuring that only faces can appear on the screen, and with that challenge came others. Such as ensuring significant lighting to extract faces, not selecting the same person/location each time, and checking to see if enough facial features were present to use the image. The end result isn't an astounding break through of art, the "pop art" coloring is nothing terribly new really. The application of the underlying technologies is what thrilled me.
More importantly, according to Dr. Solina, the crowd interaction with the piece has been entirely different than what was expected. For example, originally there was no design/consideration that someone might want to keep a copy of their image, but high demand has added that as an option. The fact that the facial recognizer tries not to select a face from the same region each time adds an element of competition and frustration to those trying to be seen on the screen.
My only concerns with this project came when Dr. Solina stated that the images are collected and stored in a database for future facial recognition processing/testing. This concerns me as a privacy advocate, but none the less doesn't discount the overall effect of the work. If you have a chance, I'd certainly suggest going to check it out. If at the very least for the public response to it.
Posted by Dan at October 4, 2003 09:48 AM