Thesis Idea

WHO / WHAT

The idea I have for my thesis is a project about the death of paper as a medium for information and personal expression, as it is being replaced by digital technology. The project is at the intersection between art and play and it will take the form of an installation for a public space, a recycle bin for paper that will collect all the items submitted by passers-by, creating a digital collection of them on a website or interactive screen.

WHY

The installation would create a collective archive of pieces of paper, whose purpose is to raise awareness of our relationship with the paper medium, what kind of paper we carry with us, what information it tells about us (a flyer, a receipt, personal pictures, etc.) and how we can express our creativity to a community of strangers by sharing original paper creations (origami, written messages, etc.).

WHERE

In the physical realm, the project would ideally be installed in a public space such as it could be a train station or a library, a place where you could expect to find a recycle bin. At the same time, though, it should be clear to whoever interacts with it that it is not a regular bin. It should be clearly specified that it’s an installation and I think a few basic interactions should be provided, such as a general idea about what can be dropped inside and what cannot, information about the project and a website URL where people can later go and find the items submitted by everyone.

On the digital side, each scanned image of every piece of paper should populate a database that would be accessible online in a website. The website would make use of data visualization techniques to represent the items by time and date when they were collected. Other visualizations could emphasize the relations between the pieces of paper based on their color (using image analysis) and the kind of information they have.

HOW

At first I thought about using digital scanners, but I would have to hack it to make it talk directly with some sort of C++ or Java application. Since I am not so good in electronics, I could probably design a mechanism that would make every piece of paper slide in front of a video camera and then use image processing code (like motion detection and background subtraction) to extract the video frame and save it into a database of images. Once the image is saved the piece of paper should slide into a container at the bottom of the bin.
The bin would be physically divided in 2 or 3 parts: the interface to insert the piece of paper, a “dark room” where the camera would save the new image and a final container where all the paper would finally go.

INSPIRATION

Ianus Keller’s Cabinet

LUST’s Poster Wall