Having a sense (vision, touch, taste, etc.) does not necessarily mean being able to fully take advantage and control of it. It takes more than just the sense itself to be fully ‘aware’. It requires thought, learning, honing your senses, etc.

Adding a camera to a computer does not give it any ‘awareness’. The word awareness itself is so broad and only really describes a concept, so saying that a computer has awareness to me seemed quite silly.

We have to design the computer, build it, code all of the programs, and then once we have a working computer – we still only instruct it to do certain calculations and tasks. Motion tracking in a computer does not mean the computer knows what a human is, and what isn’t human. It only means that we’ve told the computer to interpet a specific stream of data in specific way, and then give it back to us in whatever way the code tells it to – numbers, images, video.

In the end, we’re the ones that make sense of all of that information, while in reality all it really is - a stream of data.

One of the things I quickly realized when starting this project was that the contours in TSPS had a graphic quality much like that of a map. In beginning to look at how maps influence my life, I began to look at two things:

1. Hiking: For years now, the way I've fallen in love with places, gotten to really see what they're like, and meet many amazing people has been nature. The one thing that's different in Scotland, is that I feel a bigger amount of responsibility for the others. In Georgia and Italy - we mostly went on a whim, loosely following guide books and online forums. Here, though, the amount of preparation for each hike is overwhelming. Meeting a month in advance, gear lists, and most importantly - maps. Trails, paths, and eroded landscapes. Often being the first on the ascent, and last on the descent, I've gotten to realize just how much we change the landscape. Even walking across it in a small group, we create new paths for rivers to follow, new fault lines, new disruptions.

2. War: specifically, the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. It may seem strange for me to be investigating something like this, but (I don't think I've even come to terms with it), I got to see a country change. When we moved to Georgia in 2006, I don't think I really expected anything like that. I was aware that there were dangers, battles would go on in the mountains when the snow would thaw from the hidden passes, but I never really got to see that first hand. In the late summer of 2008, that all changed. Our family was back in Lithuania for holidays, and our dad had to go back to work. The day after his arrival - the war started. Bombs, tanks, artillery. I have a clear memory of sitting in the living room, watching the news, and thinking "that's ok, it's probably the same as always. far away from Tbilisi, dad is ok, everything is fine." Yet when the maps came on: I realized it's not ok. This time it was real, this time - it really did affect us in a much larger way than we could imagine.
 

After some of the initial ideas and sketching, I began to look at ways of integrating this into the project. My idea was to set up a kinect with OpenTSPS, and track the movement around the studio. By ignoring the Y-value, and replacing it with the Depth value, I was able to achieve a top-down view without having to actually mount the kinect on the ceiling, and do a million small squares and stich them together. Instead, I put the kinect beside my desk, and people passing by wouldn't even notice that something was different.

Whenever a person was detected, I would increase the height of that point by a tiny bit.