The Kinect as a means of altering ones visual environment is definitely a novel use for the device, and it’s incredible to see it explored by a talented artist.  As computer vision speeds its panoptic advance in to public space, our environment will become filled with visual aids to computer vision techniques, allowing the categorization and sorting of the real world into addressable, identifiable objects.  What began with the bar code or the scan card will become a sparkling world of lights and sounds just beyond our range of perception, but that we can still detect.

I’m reminded of the ever-present sparkle of nano-technological mites described in the world of Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.  Will the lack of these things seem foreign to us in a few years time, like a natural environment with no hum of electricity?

arielwaldman:

“With these images I was exploring the unique photographic possibilities presented by using a Microsoft Kinect as a light source. The Kinect - an inexpensive videogame peripheral - projects a pattern of infrared dots known as “structured light”. Invisible to the eye, this pattern can be captured using an infrared camera.”