Reading Donna Haraway “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.
The Reinvention of Nature” I realised that the proposal the
author was presenting adjusted to the practical work we are
developing on Ommatidia:
These are lessons which I learned in part walking with my dogs (…).
It is a lesson available from photographs of how the world looks
to the compound eyes of an insect (…).
The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences
shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show
us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active
perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of
seeing, that is, ways of life. There is no unmediated photograph
or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and
machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities,
each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing
worlds.
(Haraway, 1991, p. 190)
This corresponds to Haraway’s feminist version of objectivity and
following the author’s theories, we present the fly vision
algorithm as a symbolic work that corresponds to the subjugated
standpoint, the vision of the less powerful and the partial
perspective that stands against the totalization of a universal
single vision, which promises falsely equality through the
scientific rhetoric myth. Our proposal stands for transforming the
ways of seeing and constructing situated knowledge in a new
feminist objectivity.
Moreover, Ommatidia is based on the theory of Atomic Vision
developed by the Surrealist painter Salvador Dali, who, influenced
by the science of particle physics, contributed to link art and
science through showing the discontinuity of matter at a sub-atomic
level. As an example, we refer to “The Hallucinogenic Toreador”,
and we present our Ommatidia work as continuation of this and
other work - optical illusions and hypnotics forms - appearing
throughout the history of art.
The webcam processing is written in the C programming language.
It uses the GLFW library to create a window on
the desktop within which the graphics can be displayed.
OpenGL function pointers are retrieved using the GLEW
library.
The glm library is used for matrix transformations.
The libv4l2 library is used to access the USB
webcam and transfer image data from it.
The libjpeg library is used to decode the image data
from the webcam into pixel data for upload as an OpenGL texture.
The JACK audio connection kit library is used to input audio from the
soundcard, with parts of clive (which are originally
based on algorithms from of Pure-data) used to filter the
sound into frequency bands and calculate each band's volume level.
The visual algorithm is implemented in OpenGL shading language (GLSL).
There are two main parts to the algorithm: first, a coordinate
transformation to give the zoomed hexagonal cells appearance; and
second a colour transformation to give the sound reactive psychedelic
effect. There is a small neighbourhood search for the coordinates of
the center of a nearby cell of the tiling.
The coordinate
transformation is applied to two variables, one of which is translated
relative to the central cell, the other is untranslated. This is so
that the spatial derivative of the untranslated copy is continuous,
which is important as it can be used for mipmap level selection in
the textureGrad() function (the regular
texture() function would have unsightly seams at the
edges of cells).
The colour tranformation is a non-linear cosine shaping of RGB values
bracketed by a hue shift that depends on in which of the three tiling
equivalence classes the current cell is.
In addition to the webcam processing, which is a standalone program
for Linux, a small patch in Pure-data is used to send MIDI note
messages to the Novation BassStation Rack synthesizer. Pure-data is
launched with the -sleepgrain 0.1 parameter to improve
timing accuracy.
