CV Filter Booth, 2024
This real time filtering art features only computational geometry methods from OpenCV a la 2014, coded in Java with 2D graphics on a webcam stream, just like it would have been 10 years ago. In a time of more and more amazing tooling like Sora and Midjourney, I wanted to take a step back and make something a little retro when it comes to art and computation.
In peak millenial fashion, much of my aesthetic sense was shaped by 2000-2010s filters and stylization, particularly in photography and social media. Spending hours playing on the school library computers taking overly filtered photos to post. Over contrasted, ascii art, comic book textures — this piece features these effects but also outputs from computer vision foundations, like edge detection or convex hulls.
This piece is a nostalgic love letter to the artsy nerds who went from taking overly editted pics to studying and implementing computer vision methods from these building blocks. So I hope you come visit and take a pic in the filter, just like you may have done in the past.
This is also a shout out to my students at the University of Washington, where I am a PhD student, who have called these outputs “retro” in the classroom (a humbling experience many educators have about aesthetics of their teen years).
