Not You

I’m Not You is my senior thesis project for the Art Practice department at UC Berkeley. It is the result of my explorations in technology and the concept of self. Two monitors with webcams were mounted on a wall. When you stand in front of a monitor it will display the feed but replace your face with the feed of the other camera. The webcam follows your face around as you walk around the gallery too.

I have been recently fascinated with the way identities are constructed, where your personal identity is very much influenced my your social surroundings. In this piece I wanted to present this concept mediated through technology.

Exhibition text: At a young age the poet Arthur Rimbaud boldly declared to his teacher that he was an Artist with his famous quote, Je est un autre, or I is an other. He was early to understand that the self was a social construction. His poetic quote foresaw research into the self in social science. In 1902 Charles Cooley developed his concept of the looking glass self, in which a person views theirself through other’s perceptions of them and in turn gains that identify. Computer programming allows me to explore the future of the self and the ways our interactions and identities are mediated through technology.

Using technology as a medium, I try to understand its impact on the rapidly evolving human experience. The digital realm has been tightly embedded in our culture and I attempt to reveal how this digital age of surveillance and accommodation of unknown tools changes the nature of the world.

tools:

• python
• opencv