Concept
Inspiration for my project related to space came to me in an unusual place: my grandma's house. The bleached and yellowed photographs on her living room walls have made the passing of time tangible in a slightly eerie way. The level of deterioration of the photos indicate the age of not only the pictures, but also of the people in them.
It occurred to me that I haven't printed a photograph in years; to a stranger, the digital version of my 16-year-old self might look just as 'recent' as the person in the selfie I took yesterday.
I decided to mimic the process of the gradual ageing of a picture, as a modern memento mori. In this case a tablet is used as a picture frame, enabling passersby to take a selfie. In the course of a day the selfie will slowly fade, ultimately disappearing forever. However, unlike pictures on a wall, the selfie can be 'kept alive' a little while longer whenever someone decides to touch the screen. Doing so will stop the process of deterioration - but only for a few minutes at a time.
Design
Forget me not is an Android app that uses the ofxAndroid extension of openFrameworks to work on an Android tablet. ofxAndroid is used to select and use the front facing camera and to read touch input. When touch is registered, the ofxOpenCv extension is used to store the original photo and to generate a washed out version of it. The app updates the screen every 30 seconds, where the image on the screen is a linear interpolation between the original and faded photo. I used Android Studio to develop and deploy the app.