redaction
portfolio about
this was a solo project that involved integrating an OCR library within TouchDesigner, as well as making use of a document camera for a real-time, unattended physical installation.
what is it about?
when book “bans”, or challenges to remove them from access in public libraries, institutions and other places occur, the underlying force tends to be a (potentially deliberate) decontexualization of words to justify their removal. i wished to make this decontexualization appear front-and-center to those who may be unaware of the problem.
whenever a user places any form of printed text below the camera, a slew of certain decoded words float around and fade into red; such words, while some of them are basic, all of the on-screen words are matches that also are found in “George Orwell’s” 1984 - a book that has seen frequent challenges and ban attempts. furthermore, this was located on the ground floor of Chatham University’s JKM Library, where a multitude of books are available for checkout. i had hoped for users to try out various books in the library on the install, incentivizing them to look at the library’s physical collection of literature.
TouchDesigner is the “glue” that ties the Optical Character Recognition logic, document camera image duplication, and text visualization. the Tesseract OCR library is used for text recognition, and OpenCV is used for minor image cleanup. An IPEVO VZ-R document camera was used for detecting and displaying the text, as standard webcams did not work well in testing.
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