AZ Residency Follow up — Filipe Pais

I arri­ved to Resi­dên­cia AZ with a very sim­ple pro­ject in mind cal­led Blo­op. This pro­ject explo­res the idea of “enfo” — unnecessary/useless infor­ma­ti­on and infor­ma­ti­on over­lo­ad on the web, loo­king par­ti­cu­larly to soci­al networks.

Fishes don’t spe­ak, but they com­mu­ni­ca­te betwe­en them­sel­ves. For humans, this is an invi­si­ble pro­cess whi­ch is at the moment com­ple­tely insig­ni­fi­cant for us. Who cares about what is a fish saying to the other or even if he’s com­plai­ning or phi­lo­sophi­zing alo­ne? The pro­ject doesn’t intend to put fishes tal­king but ins­te­ad to use their acti­ons to dump ran­dom mes­sa­ges to twit­ter. This work plays with the metaphor of the glass hou­se and obser­ves this very own moment of soci­al networks incrustation.

In order to deve­lop this work, an impro­vi­sed struc­tu­re was built using some objects avai­la­ble in he kit­chen and all over the resi­den­ce spa­ce to track 2 fishes insi­de the aqua­rium. The com­pu­ter visi­on setup was made using 2 came­ras and valu­es of x and y of each blob (fish) were avai­la­ble to cal­cu­la­te the dis­tan­ce betwe­en them, When a mini­mum dis­tan­ce value was rea­ched a ran­dom mes­sa­ge was sent to twit­ter pro­fi­les, Bloop_a and Bloop_b, upda­ting its sta­tus. A dif­fe­rent pers­pec­ti­ve of the work using two fishes was also deve­lop but this time with the intent to cre­a­te a fake per­so­nal pro­fi­le. Here an algo­rithm sear­chs all over twit­ter for mes­sa­ges with cer­tain key words and post them into fake pro­fi­les con­trol­led by fishes inte­rac­ti­ons. Thus, each pro­fi­le pre­sents a line of inte­rest and shows up as if some per­son could be behind it.

In the first two days I was dedi­ca­ted to com­pu­ter visi­on issu­es and also to the com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on betwe­en pro­ces­sing and twit­ter. For the second perspective/project I was coding a small rou­ti­ne in order to com­mu­ni­ca­te with twit­ter api, sear­ch for tags and upda­te each pro­fi­le sta­tus. During the third day (Wed­nes­day) the pro­jects tech­ni­cal issu­es were sol­ved and wor­king as expec­ted but the fishes see­med not to like their new home and pro­blems came with that. In order to cre­a­te a good envi­ron­ment for them, I ran over local shops sear­ching for a new aqua­rium and water tre­at­ment pro­ducts. This task took a lot of time, not becau­se we were in Alen­te­jo but becau­se new ide­as arri­ved within group inte­rac­ti­on and new mate­ri­al needs came to com­pli­ca­te more the situation.

By the end of the week, a team for­med by me, Ricar­do Lobo and Mau­ri­cio wor­ked har­dly on the Pia­no Cock­tail, an ori­gi­nal idea by Boris Vian . The results obtai­ned were enough to cele­bra­te during the last eve and make everyo­ne, or almost, drin­king trough the divi­ne mechanism.

Some moments were odd and I found myself ima­gi­ning and making bizar­re things as The Wig’on’wheels:

New ide­as came up and they’ll be wor­ked out in the next residence.

This was the last ima­ge I have from Mon­te­mor-o-Novo, by the way, a won­der­ful pla­ce to work and to get inspiration.