Face Invaders
This was a functional prototype toward an idea of emotive inversion. You smile, it frowns. It oppresses. It reads your emotions, and is rather menacing.
It was meant as a reaction to people’s default ‘wow’ when it comes to tech art. So often the beauty / magic of the technological interface glosses over the fact that there is not the same cultural critique or insight we expect of other forms of art.
While this was just a sketch – a mash up of Jared’s infinite invader, with this fellow’s actionscript implementation of haars classifer cascade – it was enough to show at FILE in 2008 as FaceInvaders – the first installation I’ve ever done, that was just a web page. Not 3 computers, not random sensors… just a web cam, and a URL. refreshingly simple !
There will be future versions; meanwhile if you have flash, play with it here.
Also note, 4 years later, this can now be done without flash in a browser w/ html5 usermedia. see here for example
or here if you want to be Sean Connery. and really, who doesn’t? zardoz aside.
