Massaged Mirrors is a collection of interactive browser-based webcam artwork that investigates how digital technology mediates our self-image.

Play with it on Replit ↗

The title is a play on the intentionally misspelled title of Marshall McLuhan’s seminal book. Humans are very fascinated by our own likeness; one of the earliest fictional work about this is the Greek myth of Narcissus. The project utilizes the underlying technologies used by everyday software and popular apps (including artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms) to consider how they shape our perception.

Improvements such as the use of better machine-learning image segmentation tools (e.g. mediapipe) are in the pipeline. More works may be developed in the future. The project is built using web technologies as well as javascript libraries like p5.js, ml5, and jQuery; it is live on Replit.

GIF animations of two “mirrors” that are powered by Machine Learning (ml5)

Find out more about my art practice on Luke Warme ↗