kam

Eyes are everywhere. Cheap and accessible technology products with high-resolution imaging capacity are in every corner of our surroundings to surveil us. They watch us, record us, and even recognize us. These artificial gazes became so ubiquitous and so familiar to us that we are not even aware of them in everyday lives.

Meanwhile, human senses interact with each other and transfer from one to another. We hear vibrations, feel textures by seeing, smell tastes, taste tactility, and so on. We feel the movement only by seeing stopped escalator. Our vision translates the visual information to activate the motor sensation embedded to somewhere in the body.

“Kam” tries to twist the one’s familiarity by the phenomenon of the other. The eyeball-shaped camera follows you and imitates your blinks. The unfamiliar and unexpected behavior of this robotic camera gives lively feel to it and, at the same time, becomes eerie and unreal. It also makes you realize your sensation of blink when you find yourself trying to make it blink. Even its mechanical sounds seem to make you feel your blink physically.

“Kam” utilizes the face recognition algorithms to see one layer deeper onto our facial expression. It exposes itself by reacting to the expression, when we would not even aware of it otherwise. It makes us pay conscious attention to it and realize our own bodily existence. “Kam” intended this trivial daily happening to become a meaningful experience.

built with ESP32-CAM w/ Arduino IDE, Python w/ dlib
100x100x100MM(eyeball)