Reality.beta is a looking-glass style mobile photobooth that manipulates sent mobile webcam snapshots, sends them back to the viewer, as well as displays incoming images in a gallery on screen. These looking-glass style apps have a theme of investigating vanity. These apps serve as a parody of trending beautifying AI filters, by making selfies look intentionally deformed and absurd. The idea for this iteration came from our hacking the servers that run the simulation that we currently live in and discovering the primitive GPUS that they used in the past. We used to live amidst much worse graphics settings, but we just did not notice at the time as we had never seen anything better. We also realized that if we send the current vector position and timestamp through the older GPU and baseline graphics settings, we would receive an image back at a time of what reality would have looked like at the point in time and space during its beta phase. Streaming will be attempted soon but for safety reasons we are sticking to images.
Reality.beta / Thorne Brandt (US), Photo: Thorne Brandt
Thorne Brandt (US)
Thorne Brandt is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary creative technologist who has exhibited globally, including Art Basel, CAC, Haggerty Museum and the MCA. Since becoming an Alum of SAIC in 2007, Brandt has founded and/or resided in several art exhibition spaces including The FlowerShop, Co-Prosperity Sphere (resident), The Hills (resident), and is currently residing in and directing Digital Art Demo Space (founder) in Bridgeport, Chicago. Here he works to provide the community with exposure and access to up-and-coming technologies, tools, and approaches to art and play. The space focuses on showcasing games as art, interactive installations and experimental audiovisual experiences. Thorne is often hired for R&D software engineering projects around the country for various creative agencies to create mixed reality XR installations and applications. Brandt is also a performer, using game engines that allow for collaborative synesthetic real-time audiovisual improvisation for live and streamed experiences.