I bought a Raspberry Pi3 many years ago to take part in an art competition. I never opened the box.
The competition passed. The box stayed on a shelf. Some years later I needed something to run my home automation, so I finally opened it and put Home Assistant on it. It did that job for a long time. In a closet, quietly, doing nothing you could look at.
Then I moved Home Assistant to a real PC. The Pi was free again. I wanted to finally use it for art, which is what I bought it for in the first place.
I connected a small screen and started playing with the camera. The camera is damaged. For normal photos it is useless. For lo-res things it works fine, and the damage is part of the look.
First I made a thing about decay. I took an image and made many copies, each one missing more data than the last. Then I tied the decay to real time, so the picture fell apart as the day went on. Vanishing memory, on a schedule.
Then I tried turning the live camera into ASCII art. Then a version that plays movies on the screen as ASCII, with Matrix-style rain falling over them. I still run that one. The Matrix runs on my desk, in green characters. Sometimes Deep Throat. From across the room it is hard to tell which.
When I saw the .art competition I decided this was the time to use the device the way I planned 3 years ago.
I took the Matrix thing and stripped it down. Removed the rain. Removed the characters. What was left looked like a surveillance monitor. A cheap one. The kind you would find in some Apollo-era test that everyone forgot about, or in a future where we lost the good technology and only kept the cameras.
That fit me. I am half artist, half IT security. In security I spend my days deciding who is allowed to see what. For the art side my motto is Hidden / Exposed. My most known film is Sleep – eight hours of me sleeping, naked. I want to stay hidden and exposed at the same time.
So now the Pi streams my desk to the internet, live, all the time. When I am not at the desk, it shows a recording. At night it shows me sleeping. Naked.
Most of the time it does not look like anything. Green blocks. You cannot see a thing. Then I move, and the brain does the rest. It fills in the desk, the hand, the body. Fully exposed and far too pixelated to actually see.
He is naked. Is this porn? Or just some green Lego bricks?
Try it at art.apn201.com
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