Image Database Remix

Test for a live remix of a portrait database

The Living Portrait Project is a participatory networked photo installation that was exhibited in 2003 at the d.u.m.b.o. arts festival in Brooklyn (archive here). As a way to get people involved in the exhibit and work collectively on the outcome of the project, the portraits were all averaged together to create a universal portrait of everyone together. I also averaged together groups of 50, as the portrait began to blur beyond recognition at that point.

As an upgrade to this old project, I’m looking into how I can reuse the database of images to kickstart another project, a real-time portrait processor installation. This idea might be carried out with a webcam that webcam and distance sensor that allows a user to mix themselves into the “universal” image through their interaction with the other images within it.

Above is a test run for how the images look when they are aligned and un-aligned. Both images are random mosaics of the individual pixels within each image. The aligned image uses a database of 800 pre-aligned images, and the image on the left is same process with the raw photographs.

The previous Living Portrait Project