Impress: Visage
Art Installation exploring Community
Project Description
Who are we? What makes a community? What traces of ourselves do we leave on our community? This art installation, Impress: Visage, explores the relationship between a person's identity and their community's identity.
Impress: Visage invites participants to take a selfie and add your eyes, nose, and mouth to a collection of facial features. Later, other people can use these features to create new portraits by mixing them together. The final portraits are displayed in a gallery to show how we are all unique and connected. This project is not about reconstructing a specific human face, but rather it showcases the diversity of the human race's faces.
This installation was made for the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games. It was a great way to celebrate the diversity of the Americas and welcome people from different communities and cultures to see how diverse we all are. By combining participants' faces, the boundaries of ethnic origins become less clear. This installation is meant to appreciate the differences between diverse communities.
Project Breakdown
This interactive art installation consists of two sections:
In the first section, participants are encouraged to take selfies and leave their marks. The selfies will be automatically split up by the programmed application into elements and sent to the second section, where participants can recombine the faces among the pieces.
Projected upon one wall is the collection of elements that make up the human face: the eyes, nose, mouth, etc., collected from the selfies taken in the first section. Using a Microsoft Kinect, the audience can interact with these facial features to construct a visage of their choosing. Participants can then view a gallery of remixed faces.
The art installation was a collaborative effort between individuals from different fields of expertise, including myself. As one of the project's programmers, I focused on the development of the application that utilized OpenCV technology to analyze and split the selfies into their respective facial features.
Team
Nichie Enriquez
designer
Youhan Guan
designer + developer
Lalaine Ulit-Destajo
designer + developer + artist
Kevin Feliciano
music
Exhibitions
- 2015: Pan Am & Parapan Am Games York University, Toronto, Canada
- 2015: ISO: Student Night @ The Plant Show & Tell, ISO: Student Night @ The Plant Show & Tell The Powerplant, Toronto, Canada