Autobotography Intent – BruceW

Particularly in the field of New Media, there’s an enormous pressure to digitize yourself in a way that allows potential employers to assess numerous details about you. These can include your skills, passions, appearance, ideologies, and anything else that might emit an essence of you. How then do we take the full scope of ourselves as individuals and put them on display in the most representative way? Surely there’s a way to digitize not the full self, but everything about it…

For my Autobotography project I’d like to create a few processing sketches that bring portions of my physical self to the digital interface. I plan on putting effort into creating one or two physical projects that reflect my personality, then capturing them to digitize them in an interesting way. I also plan to convert my physical appearance into raw and simplistic vector art which I can apply code to to make it interactive in some way.

Here I’ve drawn up the vector art in Adobe Illustrator – it’s currently a static image that can’t be interacted with. I plan to apply code to it that tracks the position of the cursor to move the face.

Also, I’ve decided that to display my physical projects I’ll capture photos from many angles around it. I’ll compile these into a processing sketch so that as the user moves the cursor across it, the angle of the photos will change, giving the user new perspective and insight. I’ve mocked the code in the following sketch, which switches from blue to red to purple depending on where the mouse is on the x-axis.