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Colored Portraits
John Henry Thompson 2021
3 interactive video works on 5 screens
The Colored Portraits installation explores the possibilities of experimentation and innovation in computing and video art by investigating the creative potential of filtering live video. Evolving from an adaptation of the iOS native app DICE to the ubiquitous, browser based art-making program, p5js, Colored Portraits is born of a desire (that runs throughout John Henry’s work) to facilitate art making with computing devices in ways that are accessible to artists and creators everywhere.
Colored Portraits is a natural evolution of JHT’s creative explorations with long-time collaborator Benjamin Bergery as they seek to create fresh experiences for humans interacting with the computer to learn something new about themselves and the world around them. “Objects are Colored by the Mind” from the “YOGA SYSTEM OF PATANJALI”
The goal is to make everything that is experienced in this installation into an educational platform accessible through the browser. The code for this project will be available as an open source repository to encourage further development.
Technology - How I built this
Broadly speaking, what I am exploring here is a platform to easily apply video effects to live video streams whether the video is local or on the Internet. Technologies:
- p5js - a javascript library that makes it easier for people who do not have a mathematical or engineering background to harness the creative potential of the computer by programming in the browser.
- ml5js, a machine learning library for facial recognition, packaged together by people from ITP to make it compatible with p5js. ml5js builds on TensorFlow js.
- Live Video library created by Shawn Van Every.
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Benjamin Bergery review
COLORED PORTRAITS – 2021, by John Henry Thompson As reviewed by Benjamin Bergery
I love Colored Portraits by my friend and longtime collaborator John Henry Thompson. This striking collection of three digital works creates a progression of video portraits that intertwine the viewer’s own image with Cubism, African-American history and contemporary questions of race. By placing yourself in front of Colored Portraits, you create interactive self-portraits, which you can modify by moving your face. John Henry’s work starts by seizing the live video image of you, the viewer – the live video selfie that has become a part of your everyday post-covid life – and then transforms and transmutes your image with painterly geometrical algorithms, historical portraits, and an invitation to reflect on your own skin color. The threefold progression of pieces is quite evocative.
- FACETS Facets introduces you to abstracted self-portraits and presents 8 variations of painterly transformations, surrounding your live image with geometric algorithms that are inspired by the Cubist movement in painting created by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso a little more than a hundred years ago. Delaunay Triangulation is a recurrent facial recognition technique that is used throughout Colored Portraits. This method tracks points on your face by creating triangles between them. This “Triangle-ism” feels very much like a digital extension of Cubism. Boris Delaunay is a Russian mathematician who presented his triangulation method in the 1920s, shortly after Cubism emerged. It is a fitting coincidence that the name can also refer to cubist painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay. The mixture of Cubism and facial recognition is potent, yielding images that break your face into diamond-like facets, and other variations that smear, sketch, and present your face as moving masks of dots, rectangles and squiggly shapes. Facets replaces the automatic reproduction of video cameras with a more playful, more abstract and less predictable portraits, which outgrow their facial recognition underpinnings.
- COLOR LINE 1900 It‘s striking that this piece involves facial recognition of hundred-year-old photographs of African-Americans that were presented by W. E. B. Dubois at the Paris world fair in 1900. Something new and something old… By applying the same cubist portraiture to Dubois’ historic photographs and to your live image, John Henry boldly places your face next to powerful, formal portraits of black Americans from a century ago. The juxtaposition is almost disquieting, as these elegant, haunting presences inspire the utmost respect for their beauty and dignity. The piece invites you to reflect on the distance between 2021 and 1900, and on the way left to go forward. There are 3 faces on screen. The central image is DuBois’ original photograph, on either side are cubist/triangulated faces: a frozen photo and your live image. As Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, the background can be more telling than the foreground. The solid background color on the left side of Color Line 1900 is created from an average of your face’s color values, so that your “skin tone” is literally coloring your view of these historical images. The color line is evoked both within us and without us.
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SKIN TONE Skin Tone is the culmination of Colored Portraits. Your large shimmering cubist face now fills the screen, and your average skin coloring defines the entire background color. The neighboring screen features smaller images of the past 8 viewers, with the current live viewer in the center. You can place yourself in the spectrum of colors of people in the present. A Journey for the Viewer Colored Portraits is a journey for the viewer. You start by seeing portraits of yourself in a new light, as digital cubist paintings. Your face is then juxtaposed with powerful historical images, and you end up facing yourself and your own color, and your place among others around you. Thank you, John Henry – my cosmic non-identical twin – for your wonderful art work, Colored Portraits ! This journey does one good.