Correlates
'Correlates' is an interactive immersive digital video projection environment. The work explores how people might be visually represented within the data extraction industry. With the advent of social media and pervasive user-tracking and data capture, the information gathered about users has become the foundation of an emergent surveillance economy (what Shoshana Zuboff describes as surveillance capitalism). In this context users of social media become the raw product of the surveillance economy, this process managed by the various corporations associated with the data extractuon industry. Like all extractive industries, the power dynamic and flows of value are one way, and very probably unsustainable. Users of social media are no longer social subjects but informational objects. In the data extraction industry the data repreesentations of users are known as correlates - abstractions of individual users correlated with other users, mapping relationships in order to ascertain and predict user behaviour, through a process known as sentiment analysis. These predictions are the vehicle of exchange in the industry - what is bought and sold. It is always valuable to predict the future.
The project employs full body tracking (using the Microsoft Kinect IR sensor), which calculates the physical location and attitude of 'interactor' (viewer') bodies, creating (invisible) skeletal representations of interactors in the 3D space. Live video of the interactors occupying the installation space is mapped to their 'skeletons' to create three dimensional diffracted informational images of the interactors, which are displayed singularly and collectively in the video projections around them. These images are formed from the arrays of pixels in the live video image, rendered as various kinds of 'difraction gratings' (patterns or arrays of pixels), forming overlaying interference patterns that are activated by the parallax effect of the movement of the interactors. The below links are a record of the experiments to date.
studio recording of Correlates 4.0.8
studio recording of Correlates 4.0.4
screen recording of Correlates 3.1
screen recording Correlates 2.0
Studio stills:
Screen stills:
