In the first work, The Values of White, agents change colours in the webcam image pixel by pixel towards purer RGB colour. Their vision of colour is more ordered than the human, and this ordering reveals the primaries within all colour in the live image.

view the python code

The second experiment, Edges of Change, blacks out all of the image except small windows which agents open if they are active at an edge of change, which may be either tonal difference or movement. A passing movement is captured as an area dotted with active windows, which then dissolve.

view the python code

This YouTube link
has a longer
(but a lower quality) video
of the above.

So for the viewer, areas of greater visibility reflect change in the recent history of that area.

The agents don't distinguish between change in time or in space, but for humans looking at the output, there is a visual and semantic distinction between movement and tonal change.

In the final work, Shared Experiences, the agents are individualized by their experience when they first interact with the image, according to the pixel they land on.
The agents can then meet and if they share a similar level and type of experience a specific shape and colour appears at the location of the agent-to-agent interaction.

Those 'cultural loci' grow (enlarge in size) in the output for a given time or until newer 'cultural loci' are created. So here the processed image is detached from location and instead simulates the agents' collective memory.

Like a memory landscape, these 'loci' fade in time and intermingle with other 'loci' and can be overwhelmed by new input. But not always: like human collective memory, there is a random element.

Introduction

The goal of these experiments is to manipulate live webcam feed in intelligent ways to show something about the world that is beyond normal human vision.

In all our experiments artificial agents serve to 'order' the live feed while the world, through the webcam image, introduces 'dis-order.'

Human nature tends towards a sense of order and our experiments serve to show how 'other eyes' visualize order in different ways.

Human history is a collection of shared peaks of experience and our final work, Shared Experiences, creates a visual representation of these types of interaction between agents -- in a sense it is an ordering of the highlights (or dramas) of the collective.

1. The Values of White

In The Values of White the agent begins with a randomly assigned desire for either red, green or blue at a random location. They then 'read' the colours of that location. If the value of the primary colour in that location corresponds and is intense enough, then that primary colour is shown at that location. The colour we then see is a 'purified' extraction from the colour in the real world, which then fades (but is reinforced by a successive webcam image if there is no change in the image). The agent moves to an adjacent location and the process is repeated. So what we see is a continual struggle of the ants purifying a world that is continually bringing disorder (in terms of non-primary colours).

The most successful result in terms of reaction to a changing image while retaining some recognition of objects, was when about 3000 agents land randomly over the image and where the threshold for outputting colour was fairly high (see Figure 2).

The human eye is more sensitive to tonal change than to colour change and in fact we tend to see 'white' or 'black' as an absence of colour. White light is full of colour and the ants show this as the purest (most intense) colour, as in Figure 1.

1.1. Technical Description

The agents have a predetermined colour preference which is either pure red, green or blue.
The threshold value determines whether pixels are purified or not. The threshold is a variable between 0 and 255 (where 255 results in the lowest possible output). In our experiments with these agents on our system, we found 3000 agents moving through a 320 x 240 pixel webcam stream, with a threshold of 100, gave the best results. (see figure three)

When the threshold is less selective, the output is a pretty abstract or a random colour mess, depending on your vision (see figure four). What this implies is that the degree of selectivity of the threshold directly correlates to our experience of order in the output.

1.2. Discussion

The resulting images look similiar to the Pointillist and later Impressionist paintings in which tiny dots of pure color were applied to the canvas. Not only do the changing images look similar, the process is conceptually similar.
Agents, like the painters, order colour to obtain greater purity.
The resulting space seems flattened and mutable.
And the main visual effect works much like a filter, but a filter created by numerous randomly appearing agents.

>> Joris' page explaining how to download python
and the libraries for a windows environment.

View the python code for Values of White

Next we aimed to represent change as an instantaneous image.

We did this by blacking out the image, and then allowing agents to open windows where they are stimulated by contrasting colour values,
which may be due to either change or contrast in the image.

So in the last image of Figure 6, the area of blue windows indicates that there has been recent movement in the top left, while the red-white windows show areas of high contrast in a static part of the image.
Normal vision sees solid objects in different locations from which we deduce movement, but this system aims to make the movement itself (and not the object) visible.

So here each agents' 'eye' shows where change has occurred, where there is strong contrast in the image. If the image is static you end up seeing lines such as in figure 7 below.