2021
medəˈmôrfÉ™sÉ™s
METAMORPHOSIS
noun a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one, by natural or supernatural means.
"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."
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Franz Kafka
The Project
Self-portraits have always captured my interest. Not only do they capture who we are in the given moment but they also allow for us, the creator, to depict ourselves the way we truly see ourselves or to express some deeper emotion that may not be visible in the tangible world. Self-portraits tell the story of our lives at the times of their creation. They silently carry the struggles, the achievements, the skills, and the dreams that we carried at the time. Like a single frame from a movie reel, they mark a moment in the eternal flux that no things exist outside of. Ultimately, this shapes who we are now. This is who I am now, who I am in this moment.
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For my project I took two self-portraits that I created during my undergraduate career and recomposed them in a way that marks where I am now. When I created these my aspirations were very different from the ones I carry now. My dreams have changed and so have I. When first composed, the portraits were created using Adobe Illustrator. To recreate these images I used an application called Processing where I composed code in Java that took the original images and recreated them into something entirely different but exactly the same. It isn't so much about what it looks like but rather how it was created. The process behind the product.
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This project tells the story of the personal metamorphosis I have undergone during my undergraduate career.
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ETERNAL FLUX
portraiture of change
PORTRAIT ONE
Top Left: Original Photo
Bottom Left: Edited Photo
Right: Recreated Portrait
PORTRAIT TWO
Left: Original Photo
Right: Recreated Portrait
PROJECT CODE
portrait one
portrait two
PImage img;
void setup() {
size(900, 900, P3D);
img = loadImage("Capstone Image 1.png");
img.resize(900, 900);
}
void draw() {
background(#f1f1f1);
fill(0);
noStroke();
sphereDetail(3);
float tiles = 150;
float tileSize = width/tiles;
push();
translate(width/2,height/2);
rotateY(radians(frameCount));
for (int x = 0; x < tiles; x++) {
for (int y = 0; y < tiles; y++) {
color c = img.get(int(x*tileSize),int(y*tileSize));
float b = map(brightness(c),0,255,1,0);
float z = map(b,0,1,-150,150);
push();
translate(x*tileSize - width/2, y*tileSize - height/2, z);
sphere(tileSize*b*0.8);
pop();
}
}
pop();
rec();
}
}
PImage img;
void setup(){
size(500,500);
img = loadImage("IMG_2129.jpg");
img.resize(500,500);
}
void draw() {
background(255);
fill(0);
noStroke();
float tiles = mouseX/5;
float tileSize = width/tiles;
translate(tileSize/2,tileSize/2);
for (int x = 0; x < tiles; x++) {
for (int y = 0; y < tiles; y++) {
color c = img.get(int(x*tileSize),int(y*tileSize));
float size = map(brightness(c),0,255,tileSize,0);
ellipse(x*tileSize, y*tileSize, size, size);
}
}
}