catarina mota

:: collaboration with Joel Belouet ::

Anchored in reality, men uses his eyes to apprehend and discern. Since a young age, he situates himself in a universe of known forms and colors. A dream is the moment or space in which we abandon the representational aspect of reality to cross the threshold into abstraction, the product not of representational but of meaningful forms. Disoriented, we drift in this universe incessantly looking for meaning. Unable to ground itself on known elements, the spirit plays by analogies with its own culture/experience. Thus, nobody can objectively determine the shape of a cloud in the sky.

In Micro Dérive a cartesian robot equipped with a microscope camera continuously scans the surface of a slightly burnt toast. The incoming video images, making the original object barely recognizable in their microscopic nature, are projected onto a wall next to the scanning apparatus. In the summer of 2010, the installation ran for 14 days at O Espaço do Tempo and each day, for five hours, the camera followed a different path, an alternative micro dérive.

More images here.

technical description
For the cartesian robot we used a MakerBot CupCake CNC 3D printer without its extrusion head. The microscope camera was a very inexpensive webcam, equipped with 6 super bright LEDs, with an inverted lens. The paths followed by the camera each day were generated by Joel’s processing sketch Path Maker, which allowed us to draw several paths and shapes which the script then converted into g-code, i.e., movement instructions for the cartesian robot.