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Multidisciplinary Artist Kat Zhang, who refers to her works as "poetic engineering", creates multi-sensory experiences investigating how computation can reveal the unconscious and poetic aspects of the human and machine psyche. Recently, she has been conducting gesture-based experiments, pushing the boundaries of her artistic practice with the goal of building tools that "manipulate symbolic thinking in an embodied and intuitive way".
For this series of works using hands to explore latent spaces, Kat Zhang utilized Torin Blankensmith's MediaPipe plug-in for Derivative's TouchDesigner, which supports face, hand, pose, and object tracking with multi-person face detection, object detection, and image segmentation/background removal:
Currently, all of these projects are self-funded, and if you'd like to support Kat Zhang and her fascinating science art, consider becoming a subscriber on Substack here:
On the topic of hand gestures-based systems, earlier this year, Steven Mark Kübler presented a setup that utilizes an Arduino-based controller alongside TouchDesigner to enable its creator to manipulate digital particles through hand movements:
And shortly after that, Vasant Verma also managed to control particles with hand motions, leveraging the MediaPipe plug-in and TouchDesigner:
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