I’ve chosen to depict animals on peoples’ faces as I wanted to create this element of fantasy and since it’s been used through out time as early as the greeks and eygptians, or even in hinduism. Evidence of this has been found in this article , I felt it would bring in a cultural aspect. Meaning I wanted a mirror that would give a reflection of a different sort. In an interview conducted by The Journal of Mythical Arts: News & Reviews, Madeline von Foerster states the use of animals interposed with humans, signifies a obligation for people to examine their own so called beauty. Another artist, Paul Barnes, in a similar interview says, by use of animals he is able to show the personality of the model on so many different levels. It because of this, I felt it would be appropriate to display animal as a measure of beauty.

The idea itself uses the processing environment after much research in C++ and assistance from Carnegie. I felt while it was ambitious to proceed to work C++, which I want to still develop and explore that skill, processing provided an easy to understand environment and easy to program. As a result I used the facetracking library which incoporates JMyron and OpenCV.framework. By using this technology I was able to able to track the faces regardless of where they were and in turn I could subsitute their faces for something else.

In my previous entry I briefly mentioned online community based games such as second life and so on. This led me to another realisation that the mirror could be seen as a gateway to another life. i.e. you can look into the mirror, and you can see yourself but it is not reflecting your surroundings. Such an example that utilises this is, Benedict Sheehan’s Magic Mirror. I felt this was an example of reflecting something that is not seen and tapping into this fantasy sense allowing people to play with butterflies. It also had this interactive element allowing people to interactive with this 3rd realm in a sense.