Description

Plant Ping, 2020

Click here to use camera.

Position webcam infront of a plant, click mouse over plant.

What if the camera could act as a conduit between houseplant and owner? What would the plant express to owner that otherwise would be overlooked? How could an experimental camera respond to the idea of documenting life during self-isolation/quarantine? I was interested in this idea of the camera prioritizing a non-human over a human. I was curious to see if we would behave differently around inanimate objects. When you click the mouse over the plant in the frame, a (randomly generated) message appears on the screen - an attempt for the plant to communicate to the owner.

Design Process

The first few concepts I came up with spoke to the idea of the camera subject as the presenter, the actor. Ultimately I came to the idea of diverting the attention away from the human in the camera viewfinder and focusing attention to other subjects that would potentially appear in the frame.

The process of coding this concept was more complex than anticipated (shoutout to Jon Packles and #dtstudy for the tutor help!). The idea of using mousePressed on the video to generate a text statement from an array wasn't working in my coding process. I relied on calling functions within function draw() and observed that the video feed would draw on top of the mousePressed message. By creating a function addPoint() for establishing the mouseX position and mouseY position as well as a set of for loops in a function called drawPoints(), the randomly generated mousePressed message would retain on the video and not get overwritten.

See code here.

Reflection

Interestingly, I felt this sense of power when creating this camera. On a fundamental level, it felt like I had a responsibility in creating a device that would capture somebody/something's image. More to think about for future projects. This concept was surprisingly challenging to figure out. I enjoy the camera photo outcomes in this project - the text gives these inanimate objects life and personality! If I could expand on the idea, I would try to employ color tracking or object tracking instead of mousePressed to identify the plant in the frame.