Self / Reflection, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego

An interactive installation for a landmark photography exhibition

About the Project:

Seeing how the lives and stories of others resonate with your own is the foundation of human connection. This theme drives the exhibition 7 Billion Others, which premiered in the U.S. at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and animates Self/Reflection, a custom interactive experience made for the exhibition by our team.

Self/Reflection offers a literal yet lyrical meditation on the theme of empathy and human interconnectedness. From a distance, the 60 inch portrait-mounted screen seems to shimmer with atmospheric shapes gathered from the surrounding gallery. As you approach, you notice that the fleeting pixels are actually portraits–faces of every color, ethnicity and expression–and the image they create together is your own. Your living portrait, captured by an HD video camera, is made up of the portraits of hundreds of other people. Seeing yourself in others, and others in yourself–Self/Reflection presents a digital analog of human connection.

How We Did It

Self/Reflection is written in Processing, an open source programming language developed for the creative coding community. The application is built so the idea can be iterated and new images used as opportunities arise for future gallery environments.