Revision as of 15:34, 22 July 2026 by Neoksaal(talk | contribs)(Created page with "thumb|ascii converted photo of martijn and a dead seagull =<span style="font-family:monospace; font-size:25px;">What</span>= a live display interface that processes both the current camera feed and a stored feed from several mintues ago (exact time gap tbd). both feeds are converted to ascii data and overlaid on the same screen(i'm also planning to customize some of the ascii characters but that's for later). when the two layers of...")
a live display interface that processes both the current camera feed and a stored feed from several mintues ago (exact time gap tbd). both feeds are converted to ascii data and overlaid on the same screen(i'm also planning to customize some of the ascii characters but that's for later). when the two layers of present and past collide, their ascii patterns interfere with eachother on the data level. this interference actively changes the shape of the present feed. so what appears on a screen would be a version of the present that is recalculated, distorted and reshaped by the past data. or the other way around.
ideally, viewer should be able to see it as either the past is interfereing with the present, or the present is interfering with the past.
Why
I want to visualize memory as something that is constantly being reconstructed, always reshaped by the conditions of the present rather than a fixed record of the past. in this sense memory is never stable, it keeps changing and it actively interferes with what we perceive as present and by extension the future.❶ I'm hoping that this unstable, mutable, irreversible process could disrupte the neat, linear sense of time we are used to, especially the way we assume the present just follows the past in one straight line. In this setup, the “now” is something that's constantly interfered by the past--and vice versa--and that real-time(or "live") is not a clean or direct window to the present.
ASCII?
(honestly, who doesn't like to play with ascii)
ascii is one of the methods that I can use to turn frames into something I can work with as data, which is basically a set of characters on a grid that maps each frame by brightness to darkness. I can customize the characters, and let them overwrite and collide with each other based on certain set of rules i give it(..right?).
when the ascii-rendered past and present feeds collide on the x-y grid, I want that collision to happen structurally and somewhat rule-based. I don't want it to just layer two different frames on top of eachother, it's importnat that it's not just pixels blending like video overlay, it should be about the characters on a grid interfering, overwriting and reacting to each other according to a set of rules(still need to figure it out). so this way both layers can actually reshape each other grid by grid.
now that I come to think of it, might be a stretch but i can almost treat it like a game. maybe like chess, or game of go, or even Conway's game of life, as long as the interaction happens on a grid and follows rules. maybe the rule-based interface might even evolve. maybe maybe
↳ actually--based on a new discovery while analyzing the exmaple code--even though ascii output visually looks like a 2d grid, and conceptually still is, but technically it's a long string with line breaks. which means whatever rule-based interaction or interference between past and current frames that I'm trying to design has to happen through string logic. not direct grid manipulation
Workflow
16/06
what Leo from interaction station advised to do first:
1. run live stream from OBS to youtube
2. capture screen on live stream in OBS
3. convert screen capture into secondary cam
4. render livestream into ascii
↳ honestly this is too hard for me to figure out within a week or two, gotta find an easier and simpler way to do this within p5.js
as long as I convert the video frames to ascii data first and store them, I might able to stretch the time gap beyond one minute without frying my computer (let's see because one minute accumulation of ascii data is alreay about 9GB)
no rgb value, just greyscale for optimiaztion--wat
fliipping ascii characters between current frame and past frame is possible, just render them before storing them in array. just make sure density variable has same amount of characters for modulation
