The Snow Cam
Inspired by the Wallace Stevens poem of high-school English class fame (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-snowman.html)
and by the simple yet ingenious program (a camera watching the snow!) that aired on Somerville Cable Access Television every time it snowed in my town when I was growing up, which always looked more or less like this:
***WTF/OMG tangent***
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2067664373050394413
I just rewatched “The Snowman,” the classic animated kids’ movie, which I haven’t seen in about 15 years but which I now experience with an eery physical recall, as though I had lived it rather than just seen it about 400 times at age 6… I can smell the Christmas tree, feel myself being dressed by the mother and touching the cold leaded-glass panes on the front door… amazing….
But it’s introduced by freaking DAVID BOWIE, in 1982, which is cerca the Let’s Dance era:
which was several years before the Labyrinth era (wow you can really see the crows feet in this picture)…
But right after the DB intro to The Snowman, a barn owl swoops towards the camera over the title of the film, exactly like the animated barn owl that flies through the titles and turns into DB in Labyrinth!
Does David Bowie identify closely with barn owls? I guess he kind of looks like one. I just feel like my childhood is collapsing in on itself and it is disturbing.
***End of Tangent***
The Snow Cam is installed in a place where it snows a lot, facing a blank (or green-screen?) wall about 15 feet from the lens of the camera. A computer program (here’s the part where I don’t know how to do it) counts as accurately as possible the total number of snowflakes falling within the camera’s field of vision at all times. The count will be displayed on a screen next to the space-full-of-falling-snow in question so the viewer can compare the snow they are watching with the snow that the computer is watching.
The whole project is pretty simple, just to make people to think about the difference between the computer eye and the human eye, and to create a literal manifestation of the stereotype of the computer as “cold and calculating.” It has a nice contemplative flavor to it, I think.
