A lighter and darker you

Description

This project gives viewers the opportunity to play with a version of themselves that could be either lighter or darker than their own coloring. What would I look like if I had fairer skin? What would I look like if I had darker skin? How would the camera see me? Or would it?

Reflection

It's hard NOT to think of the great color divide between people these days, especially in the US. With our generation's civil rights movement, one could imagine learning something by imagining what life would be like if we looked like someone else, possibly someone on the other side of the divide.

I'm currently reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, a book that describes racism in America as a caste system, similar to the Indian caste system, with many historic examples of systematic and intitutional discrimination based on color.

Design Process

I knew I wanted to make something that flipped pixels in some way. I thought of a few ways to show this tranformation. I thought about complementary colors (orange to purple, yellow to blue and red to green)

The idea that was most interesting to me was to make people feel like a different color, by flipping their coloring. Making lighter poeple look darker, and darker people look lighter. I wrote the psuedo code, and ended up with splitting the canvas in two so viewers could see both a lighter and darker version of themselves.

It could almost be like a strange form of play. Is there a side you like better? Which side do you want to be on? Could you imagine yourself being lighter or darker? Do you see yourself? Can others see you?

I added an ellipse so you could center your face within the camera screen, kind of like a passport application. It's difficult to put your face in the right spot because it's mirrored. I found some code some colleagues to fix that.

Now you can move the mouse to lighten one side of your face and darken the other.

Darker and lighter yet...

Until they are both gone.