Chromas - 2012

Chromas imagine three stages of development of colour lover machine. This interactive installation explore what role could take perception and cognition in a machine. Over three screens (one for each three stages) is in visualised the inner thinking of the agent. This agent perceives its surroundings through a webcam and sees it as large coloured tiles, like a heavily pixelated version of the world. If the camera is its eye, the screen is a window to its mind, a view of its reflection & way of seeing the world.

Three screens for three stages. At first, the agent gathers some information about its surroundings. So many colours, coming and going! Still afraid of this overdose of information, the agent tries slowly to understand better and better this new environment. Still pretty shy, whenever too many new colours pop up, it falls back to a safer distance with a more fuzzy view.

Once better at ease with this new world, it’s time to make sense of it! And as far as the robot is concerned, the only things worthy of its attention are colours. To classify and make sense of them, it creates a whole new language. It does so by trying to describe and classifying each colour with respect to their parameters and the other colours it already has in memory.

Last, once this new world is classified, the robots will act upon it, forging its environment in a way it sees fit. While a lot of notions (gravity, up & down, people & object…) help us making sense of the world, this agent only knows the vocabulary of colours. It will use it to reorganise this messy world and forge it in its own vision by minimizing entropy. An endless task, as new colours keep popping up. Curious about how this agent sees your face? Just stand in front of it and look at it as it reorganises your image in a way that makes sense to it.