Give Me a Hand

photogrammetry+unity+stream

Technology: Metashape, Unity, OBS, Zoom

a webcam filter of hand representations
and its indicated overwhelming intimacy

Keywords: webcam setup, performance for camera, work from home, photogrammetry, everyday

Prompt: Rate My Setup #WFH

“make our own maximalized altars surrounding a space we stream from” “Performing for the camera: the Dec 7, 2020 cover of The New Yorker illustrated a woman dressed up only above the waist and holding a cocktail for a Zoom Happy Hour, meanwhile her laptop is perched on 5 books and you plainly see the daily mess of her apartment just out of the reach of the webcam view, with a cat poking its head out of a litter box. Rate My Setup highlights the continual aestheticization of personal, digital life and the curation of our living, working, gaming, and streaming as something which is cropped, filmed, shared and rated. In this workshop, we take this aestheticization as a space of exuberance stuck between honesty and irony, celebration and depression, self-care and alone together collectivity amid quarantine. High-fidelity streamer setups with Battlestation Gamer PC Builds and their shitty ironic make-shift counterparts (epitomized by the Rate My Setup request and meme format) now seem to bridge a gap between those “thriving” #onlygoodvibes #blessed and those just barely getting by but maybe over it all. With Hot Cheeto dust lingering behind on glowing RGB mechanical keyboards, this heightened glorification of the desktop setup with the view it captures becomes an emblematic altar of the values and interests we want to express and realities we want to obscure and neglect.” (from workshops with media artist Leah Wulfman, Creative Tech, MFA Media Design Practices, ArtCenter)

capturing myself in a webcam frame......just another day working from home......
(hello and apologies for the webcam quality)