An Installation on Jennifer Haley's The Nether: By Junior Garcia and Vince Nguyen

Concept

This project is a technological performance that expands on one of the key concepts in Jeniffer Haley’s “The Nether”. After reading such intriguing piece, me and my partner got fixated on the concept of a terminal that takes individuals from the real world to the digital world (The Nether). We saw such device as an extremely powerful pivot point that allows users to engage in a duality of their own identity. As such, we decided to recreate this concept by creating a terminal of our own using Tensorflow’s PoseNET library. Our terminal allows users to have a different faces on and play music with their hands whenever they look at our camera’s screen, thus allowing them to be an entirely different person in our rendition of a digital world. This website, coupled with our own performance sketch where a person transforms into Beethoven and plays music with his hands’ movement after living an entire life as a handless person, poses the question of whether living in a future (or present) that allows people to have both a real and digital identity is really worth compromising intimate interpersonal relationships?

Technical Hurdles

Both me and Vince had no experience using Tensoflow’s Computer Vision library, so most of the challenges we faced where part of the learning process itself. However, online documentation and team collaboration helped us accomplish our vision. Something we wish we could have extended on was on creating a more efficient algorithm that better maps the movement of the hands to the music. Right now, we only have a simple play function that plays the music whenever the hands are detected above a predefined distance. However, a way of detecting the hands’ speed and match that to the rhythm at which the music is played would have been better.

Team work

Our team was only composed of two people, which in my opinion facilitated coordination efforts. Both of us had Javascript experience and we were excited at implementing this project, so our workflow followed a natural cadence of code contribution based on our own individual schedules. We had like three meetings for ideation, which proved to be the most difficult ones as narrowing in on a technical device and a performance that would best portray our interpretation of the Nether’s terminal was very time consuming.

Audience Reception

Our lighthearted performance sparked laughs from the audience, which I didn't expect to be given its informal nature. In addition, people had the initiative of using our terminal after our performance by trying to play music and dance in front of our camera, which was a performance me and Vince both enjoyed and appreciated.