Eyes can see you

Eyes can see you intend 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 the 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 the material. This software runs 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 playback 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 allows 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 night, 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 uploading 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 on the web. The presentation can be in public spaces, parks, coffees, or small auditoriums. The shorts are shown and the subtitles algorithmically added in 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.