Hi,
So kyin and I (weija) were paired up, and we decided to collaborate together to construct our project. As we interviewed each other, we felt like a really interesting way to portray someone was through their youtube suggestions and other youtube history related content. Basically, the motivation behind this was that we think someone’s youtube video history is quite personal to them, since a lot of the time when we watch youtube videos its rather in a private setting. At least for us, we both agreed it was rather personal and sometimes even embarrassing when we revealed both of our video suggestions.
Our idea is to create a universal portrait machine, that can be applied to anyone. The idea is for a user to input their youtube username, and have a photo taken of them. The program will parse all youtube video content related to their username, such as view history, subscriptions, suggestions, etc. Our goal is to compile ~in the order of 1,000 video thumbnails, which we can then use to “paint” the portrait of the person. (The generated pixelated art should look similar to the photo, our goal is to gather enough photos with a large array of color choices so that each thumbnail can cover an accurate color of the person’s face.)
Ideally, this is the kind of image that we are hoping to portray.
Our main inspirations from this came from guest speaker Kyle Mcdonald’s piece where he documents his keyboard activity through a twitter bot, as well as (not related to Kyle), the person who took screen shots of all their website links that they clicked on their laptop (sorry, completely blanking on the name of this person).
Thanks!
-weija and kyin