ThisIsReal on Time Square
I always dream of one day our project will be put up on a giant billboard in Time Square…
Outrage Machine is an internship course at ITP, in collaboration with Viacom and NYC Media Lab, aimed at interrogating social outrage using screen-based interactive design and storytelling.
Presented on the Viacom billboard at 1515 Broadway at 44th street in Times Square on January 29th. As the class takes their work into the public forum for a super size user test on tourists and passersby. You’ve heard of the ever popular kiss-cam, right? Outrage Machine offers a different kind of mirror — one for showing us who we really are, and what our collective outrage does when it goes, unchecked, out into the world.
The topics of our team is a critique on body image in 2016. Media sets an unrealistic body image standards and photoshop generates fake bodies promoting the ‘perfect’ physique. Thus, people’s perception of real beauty is altered. In an attempt to emulate the countless media images viewed, people often take drastic methods. We want to critique on excessive airbrushing and create a new standard of beauty.
Real people = Real standards
We developed a web application designed for iPad, iPhone to reverse the photoshop process in real time. Than, we mirror the screen to the Viacom billboards. You can interactive with the app in the following link:
Design Process
We had two photo shoots set up where friends and fellow students volunteered to be photographed. Then we started to retouched those photos. In addition to popular effects such as color correction and liquify, we even add accessories and change the background to make the difference more extreme. After testing on Time Square we found out how dramatic the change had to be in order to be effective. Our final step was to incorporate the photo into a magazine cover that we made up. We named it Blemish ironically.
The app is built upon web socket. There are three websites : one is on the controller’s iPad where people on Time Square can play the app; the second is mirroring the controller’s iPad onto the billboard on Time Square; and the third is for general public to play the app but won’t be mirrored onto the billboard. In the end, we put up a official website to host the documentations of this event and let the app to live online continually.
