Digital Loupe

(November 2019, with the MIT Museum Studio)

I created an aggressively digital world that can be explored in a charmingly analog way.

Digital Loupe provides a tactile, lo-tech portal into viewing a surreal and highly digitally influenced virtual world. You can come up to the lens, fiddle it around, and watch the technicolor scenes go by. There are two parts to the story of how and why it exists: the digital and the analog.

Part 1: The digital

The digital base of the piece is a series of video experiences I made out of around 500 photos captured at an art installation created by Brian “Elmo” Neltner. Their installation included a large box with a strobe light that strobed at rates interacting with how the human brain processes visual input. While photographing the installation, I discovered that the strobe light also interacted with how my mirrorless camera scans its sensor to capture images.

When in silent mode, a mirrorless camera does not use its mechanical shutter to control the exposure. Normally, the mechanical shutter opens up to expose the sensor to light for the duration of the exposure, e.g. 1/60th of a second, then mechanically closes. Instead, in silent mode the sensor is continuously exposed to light, and its pixels are scanned in horizontal rows to take a photo. This causes a variety of artifacts when photographing things that change during the exposure. In this case, it’s the strobe light flashing through dozens of colors.

Effectively, the scanned sensor causes a rolling shutter artifact as the sensor is scanned top-to-bottom over some elapsed amount of time. The varied colors and bars in these images are a result of the strobe flashing through different colors or turning on and off completely while the photo is being taken.

I took advantage of these wild and nondeterministic artifacts and shot several sequences with subjects in various poses or doing actions. The resulting videos show the passage of time on several different levels: the artifacts appearing in the individual images, the differences between images in a sequence, and the movements of the subjects during the sequence. Lastly, I added to the color chaos by manipulating the color data in Photoshop.

Part 2: The analog

How should one present this aggressively, surreally digital universe to a viewer? Its natural home is on a screen, but peering into the glitchy details of the videos reminded me of a much more archaic experience.

There’s a tool called a “loupe" that’s used for viewing film images up close. It’s essentially a tiny magnifying glass that you place on top of your film and then peer into with one eye. You use this little plastic tool to inspect the images you took weeks or months ago, and both the tool and the photos are only about an inch in diameter. While squinting into your tiny photos, you inspect their minute details and recall the moments when you captured them.

I thought that this tactile, engaging, almost dainty experience was the perfect way for a viewer to experience the loud and maximal digital content. I created a box with a screen inside playing the videos and a loupe suspended directly over it with bungee cords. The bungee cords hold the loupe centered over the image, but allow it to be tilted around and moved closer or farther. I left the loupe slightly out of focus in order to increase the optical artifacts while looking through the plastic lens; there is barrel distortion, chromatic aberration, and scratches and smudges on the lens itself.

Part 3: The final product

The result is a black box with a porthole that flashes distorted glimpses of what’s inside. When you approach the box, the ridged grip of the loupe has an affordance for holding it and tilting it; putting your eye all the way up to the lens reveals a digital world filtered through the rough aberrations of a thick plastic lens. The screen cycles through five different video scenes in addition to the one below.