Neither interactive nor reactive.
Instant film pictures taken with the Polaroid sheet camera and put inside felt photo corners sewn on a t-shirt.
Thanks to N. Hayakawa for the photo session assistance.
As part of the Somethingscopes series, the Zazaziza optical department has been sketching and testing a concept for a motorised forensic camera that takes instant film snapshots of computer screens.
The Polaroid sheet camera uses the basic principle of light polarisation to mimic the behaviour of a camera diaphragm and shutter. LCD screens emit polarised light which allows a Polaroid sheet in the camera to take on the diaphragm behaviour.
By changing the rotation of the Polaroid sheet, the amount of light that passes through can change from almost nothing (diaphragm closed) to nearly the full intensity that is being beamed by the source (diaphragm fully open.) In this way the “Polaroid diaphragm” adjusts the amount of light reaching a photosensitive material–a single sheet of instant film*–that will become the final picture.
A stepper motor controls the rotation of the camera body, from the light blocking position to the fully open position (90 degrees), in which the instant film is exposed for a predetermined amount of time before the whole camera body is rotated back to the blocking position.
After being exposed, the instant film sheet is taken out of the camera body (in a dark room) and developed normally by making it pass through a roller mechanism. Hopefully, all this explanation will make more sense after watching the video of the camera in action:
As of now, Zazaziza has no idea what problem this camera is the answer to, nevertheless we hope it can be seen as a small homage to the genius of Edwin Land, one of the greatest inventors of the 20th century.
Zazaziza has no affiliation whatsoever with the Polaroid Corporation or the FujiFilm Corporation, we’re just instant film groupies.
*Instant film FujiFilm FP-100c was used, although other references of Fuji or Polaroid should also work fine.
Polaroid filters rock.
Donald Norman once wrote something about how the Amish aren’t necessarily against ‘modern’ technology, as sometimes the stereotype seems to picture them. As observed by Norman (among many others), they usually wait a little bit longer (centuries, perhaps) to check if any new technology has any nasty side effects on people, before deciding to use it. Somehow that concept inspired us to think about a persona, for whom the time span of technologies and their nature (analogue, digital, psycho-holographic, whatever) mean absolutely nothing.
So, what will life be like for the average Amish/Mad Max variety of human in 2250? We imagine this person building things for his own community by mixing mechanical and animal-powered devices from the 18th century with 21st century mobile phones, repurposing and hacking VHS recorders, Michael Faraday inventions and whatnot. Would this rogue element be expelled from his community? No clue, we don’t do the forecasting thingy here!
Pictured above: testing direct camera-less techniques for taking analogue screengrabs using Polaroid instant film. Work in progress or meaningless deviation for/from the Somethingscopes series.
The first exploration in the Somethingscopes series is the Polaroid flower, a mechanism of gears, rubber bands and a USB-powered motor that makes spin a circular arrangement of Polaroid filters.
The Polaroid flower is based on the principle that light, as a transverse electromagnetic wave, can be polarised, that is, instead of having it going in all directions, there are ways of making it disperse in only one direction. Polarisation is also the principle behind LCD screens, which means that this kind of screens use Polaroid filters in order to make the liquid crystal arrange visible.
So, what happens when a series of Polaroid filters overlap? the answer is that they further filter down lightwaves depending on their rotation, and in certain combinations they can filter specific frequencies (colours).
When an observer uses polariser lenses oriented perpendicularly to the direction of the light coming from the screen, that light is blocked; however, if between the screen and the polariser lenses there are additional filters oriented at different angles, the overall blocking effect of the polariser lenses can be cancelled out in specific areas.
Hopefully, some of the above will make more sense after watching the video below. The next step for the Polaroid flower is to make it augment or react to what is happening on the screen.
Somethingscopes are a series of objects that explore interactive/reactive phenomena from the eyes of a Victorian time traveler. These electromechanical/optical contraptions draw inspiration from simple machines, and what they do is basically try to interfere/react with/to computer screens.
A distant cousin of the Somethingscope is the contemporary widget, a small application that runs in its own window and provides very specific information to the user. A Somethingscope can be seen as a physical widget of sorts, in the sense that it is a small contained system that lies on the screen and it might react to and influence whatever is happening at the GUI level of the computer OS, but since a Somethingscope is physical, it could be understood as a kind of reverse augmented reality, that is, augmenting the virtual from reality.
As this is a work in progress, our self-imposed brief might be subject to change, nevertheless the spirit of the idea is to recreate simple physical/optical phenomena that could persuade humans to think and feel about the dialectic of the physical and onscreen worlds and . Or something.