Shapeshifter
The muscle memory of taking a photo, rebuilt as a camera you play with a mouse.
Self-Directive Project. We ran through workshops taking systems apart: a newspaper spread cut down to its subject, a VHS tape dismantled and unspooled with Vir Mohan, a paperback cut through to its last page. Then we had to pick a system of our own and visualise it.
I picked the one nobody notices doing: the run of taps that takes a photo on your phone. I broke Apple's camera interface down into its icons, drew my own set from them, and animated the sequence in After Effects so you can actually look at a journey you never think about.
Then I moved it from After Effects into TouchDesigner, which turned the diagram into something you play. Live webcam in, mouse left and right controls the resolution, up and down controls the exposure, right-click cycles through filters I colour-graded myself. The exposure scroll on a phone camera becomes something you perform instead of something you follow.
The outcome is the photos it makes. I had a play around with friends and shot them through it in real time, and I liked how pixelated and oversaturated it came out, like something from about 2012. I learned TouchDesigner from scratch for this brief and used an AI assistant as a tutor for the build, but the filters, the sound and the direction are mine.
An interactive camera filter built in TouchDesigner, and the photographs I made with it.
