UPDATE Adobe and SFMOMA Collaboration: Self Composed

Adobe was ap­proached by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to cre­ate an in­stal­la­tion for the re­launch of the mu­seum in 2016. The pho­to­graphic cu­ra­tors wanted an ex­pe­ri­ence that en­cour­aged peo­ple to ap­proach pho­tog­ra­phy thought­fully and cre­atively, want­ing to help peo­ple think crit­i­cally about pho­tog­ra­phy in a world where cam­er­as are in every­one’s pock­ets and im­age mak­ing is cheap.

I was approached to manage the pro­ject in its early stages as part of a new community engagement program I was developing, and through a col­lab­o­ra­tive ideation process with the mu­seum we ar­rived at a di­rec­tion in­spired by the form of sun­prints, or cyan­otypes. Through the early we­b­cam pro­to­types we re­fined the ex­pe­ri­ence largely as it was in­stalled, where the user’s por­trait is ob­scured un­til they be­gin to in­ter­act with a glass table in front of them.

As the user casts shad­ows on the table, their por­trait is re­vealed in the cast shad­ows in the com­pos­ite, viewed on a screen in front of them in real time, and af­ter a count­down ex­pires the photo is cap­tured. If the user likes their re­sult, they can print out a re­ceipt with their cre­ation and a link to down­load the full im­age. This in­ter­ac­tion sim­ply can’t de­liver you a photo of your­self un­less you are will­ing to en­gage with it.

Adobe has a write up about the pro­ject here and the mu­seum wrote about the project here. Self Composed was also fea­tured in the 23 Annual Communication Arts competition for Environmental Interactive design.

Images pro­duced by the in­stal­la­tion can be found on Instagram un­der the hash­tag #SelfComposed.