Vectorised Selfies

My practice, such as it is with these selfies, appears to currently consist of throwing them wholesale through a grinder of some description and seeing if what happens helps me reach the goal of figuring out something interesting about mobile-enabled self-portrature. So at this stage I’m always on the lookout for new grinders, specifically ones that will let me process thousands of images at a time.

(This sadly means phone apps, like the marvellous Glitché, aren’t much use in themselves though they do provide inspiration and the drive to learn how to program that stuff myself.)

One program that runs on my Mac and does allow for batch processing is DMesh which I found on the Kinectology tumblr. It’s a simple app for triangulating points on an image and creating smooth vectors. Or something. I don’t really understand the science behind it (computer vision and object recognition) but I recognise the aesthetic. What interests me is it’s a different way of averaging a photo. So let’s give it a go.

Here’s the original 9 selfies again.

And here they are put through the basic DMesh settings.

These are lovely and very seductive, but it can only be the beginning - anyone can do this with the iPhone app after all. So here’s a few attempts at mixing compressing and pixelising in with the vectors.

I’ve hit a brick wall here, possibly because what I’m starting with is, in my mind, a perfectly realised finished product. But if I can maybe deconstruct the vectorising process in the future…