505_metadata

Title of Work
Ojos Te Vean

Title of Components
Ojos Te Vean (for all the parts)

Creator
Hugo Solis

Creator Affiliation
DXARTS: Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media University of Washington

Rights Abstract
This work is licensed under the Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives Creative Commons License. (by-nc-nd)

Short Description
Eyes can see you (Ojos te vean) intends to be a non-utilitarian channel of poetic audiovisual creation. It is a collaborative net project that produces short abstract videos using the material generated by the users over the Internet. In order to achieve this goal, the project is made of a forum, a customized piece of software, a server, an automatic audio and movie mashing system, an automatic subtitling machine, and a set of public showing events organized by the participants.

How does it work? Participants and general public access the link www.OjosTeVean.net and create an account. This is the link with the forum, the announcements of public events, the material created over the days, and the calendar of public events.

Participants can download a piece of software that allows the recording of material. This software run on any machine, it is simple to use and requires only a webcam, a microphone, and Internet access. This piece of software allows the recording and play back of video and audio content. It also allows searching, organizing, and displaying images by querying words. If, for example, the user type the word “apple” the program will randomly search on the web for ten images tagged with such word. The piece of software allow also to type text in the form of dialogs. These texts will be used for generating the subtitle of the movies. Once the participant is done with a session, the material is sent to a server.

Every nigh, if there is new material, a new piece of video is automatically generated. The recorder audio and video, and the searched images are algorithmically combined and altered. The material is treated in such a way that the original content is almost unrecognizable. The creators can perceive some of the gestures tough. The piece is then upload into the webpage where participants can see their collective creation.

The last step in the creative process is during the public presentations of the material. Once a set of about ten shorts has been created, a public presentation is scheduled in the web. The presentation can be in public spaces, parks, coffees, or small auditoriums. The shorts are shown and the subtitles algorithmically added on real time. The main material for generating the subtitles is the text material previously created, but the audience may intercalate new text on the fly by sending SMS messages by cell phone. The subtitles are modified algorithmically using grammatical analysis and artificial intelligence.

Keywords
Installation, audiovisual, collaboration, mashing, automatic, collaborative creation, video art, short movies, subtitle, spanish, sound art, cellphone, SMS, Java, superCollider, MaxMSP.

Intention of this Work
The project is an artistic effort against the issue that most of the communication channels in the Internet tend to be of clear pragmatic use. Chats, forums, and video conferencing programs are usually employed for transmitting raw content. In this way, all these media can be thought as a technological extrapolation of the telephone metaphor. The Internet channels are more sophisticated and offer a bigger bandwidth that allows the sending and receiving of image, video, group interaction, and more. However, the use that people gives to the new media has, in essence, not changed at all. We used the chat for keep in touch with friends and relatives. In the same way, we used Skype as a video telephone and it is coming to leave the video content unattended for long periods of time favoring the audio channel. Which non-mainstream possibilities do the users are aware of and employ regularly in the capabilities of the Internet?

Date of Creation
June and July 2007

Date Available
31 July 2007

Premiere
12 October 2007 at the Transitio MX 02 Festival

Date of Submission
02 February 2008

Contributors
Contributor 1: Hugo Solis
Role: Concept, programming, production.

Contributors Affiliation
Contributor 1 Affiliation: DXARTS, University of Washington

File Format
Documentation Files Submitted:

1. JPEG
2. Quicktime Movie

Hardware and Software for running the server
G5 Mac 10.4
Apache server
MySQL database
Drupal
Super Collider sound programming language
MaxMSP with Jitter interactive programming language
Java with media libraries
Software designed for this work

Hardware and Software required to view the gallery version
Projector and screen
2 channels Audio system
G5 Mac 10.4
MaxMsp with jitter
Software designed for this work

Hardware and Software required to submit content online
Personal computer with internet access
Java 1.4
Video camera
Software designed for this work downloadable in the page of the project

Software Utilized in Production of Artwork
Java 1.4
MaxMSP with Jitter
SuperCollider

Software Required to View Documentation Files
Web Browser
Quicktime Player

Medium
Web + Audiovisual installation

Work Genre
Audiovisual Installation

Spatial Coverage for public version
3'w x 7'h x 3'd

Identifier
1. fR_image (.jpg documentation photograph)
2. fR_video (.mov documentation video excerpt)

Filename
1. frameGH.jpg
2. descriptionSL.mov

Contact Information
hugosg@u.washington.edu