blobby

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week 01 jan 29, 2025Thesis is thrilling because it is an opportunity to showcase a semester long project as a spectacle. A large part of my work during graduate school has been on the internet, typically in the form of a website, and that means it rarely takes up much space in a room. For my final hurrah, I really want to make something that is more than a laptop open on a table—I started thinking about how the internet’s unique affordances could be brought to life in a more immersive way. 

Blobby is my attempt at translating the digital into an installation-like experience. At its core, it is a participatory art work that invites people to step in front of one of six webcams to view their body contour transform into a blob-like silhouette. Instead of projecting each of the six blobs as is, the overhead projection will combine all of them to create a generative art piece that arranges the blobs side by side to create a cohesive larger image. As participants move, their blob contours will shift in real time, effectively changing the larger depiction. My hope is that the piece captures fleeting moments of collaboration to create a shared composition that is fun but also technically sound. 

Although the project will exist solely as a physical installation during the showcase, I aim to make it accessible and usable online afterward. The indie web has shown me that the internet should be free, fun, and accessible. Even before considering turning this project into an installation, I had already planned to create a web-based version of Blobby for both documentation and accessibility purposes.
Since the web version would be limited to a single webcam, I envision it preserving the same ‘blobbification’ processes and generative visuals by using delayed feeds from that webcam, enabling a single participant to construct the composition independently.

To simplify the process, I’ve broken the project down into parts:

  1. use webcam feed to create a ‘blobby’ contour
  2. network six webcams to work in one system
  3. apply tile algorithm to all six webcam feeds 

Step 1 involves finding a body recognition framework that is compatible with webcams (which most likely are) and applying a ‘blobby’ shaping to the body contour.

Step 2 focuses on selecting six webcam devices that can operate simultaneously and determining how to stream their feeds concurrently. Afterward, each feed must be able to apply the ‘blobbification’ shaping developed in the previous step.

Step 3 involves developing a generative algorithm that utilizes the six webcam feeds. For this, I plan to use a derivative of a tile algorithm, such as Truchet or Wang. In this approach, each of the six blobs would act as a tile, and these tiles would form a grid arranged to depict a larger, cohesive image.
option 1
option 2

Option 1 depicts three panels of projections of a generative tile grid and three tables that each house two webcams. It is very possible that projecting six webcam feeds (with the ‘blobbification’ applied) in a generative grid may require too much processing power. In that case, option 2 presents an alternative that would use a single webcam with delays to construct the tile set. This will also be the format of the web version. 
©Aditi Gupta
New York University
Integrated Design & Media (IDM) Graduate Thesis