stopwatch / watchstop
The amplified ticking of a clock can be heard emanating from one of two adjoining rooms in a space. Sometimes the ticking stops, sometimes it’s joined by an overlap of ticking from the other room. On the wall in each space is a microphone attached to the wall connected to an amp and speaker. Each microphone picks up the sound of a clock in each space installed either side of an adjoining entrance. The clock is also connected to a cctv camera. When you notice this, and depending on which space you are in, a clock and its accompanying tick either starts or stops.
Each of the two clocks, each connected to a cctv camera and open source facial recognition eye tracking software are encountered either side of an entrance way. They behave in an inverse fashion when someone looks at them – one clock (stopwatch) stops when you look at it, the other clock (watchstop) stops when you don’t.
Each contraption tracks people, head and eye movements via a facial recognition library to see if you anybody in the field of vision of the cctv camera is looking at it.
The count in stopwatch marks accumulated hours minutes and seconds that the clock has been ignored, whereas the count in watchstop marks the amount of time it has been looked at. Of course, even when a clock appears idle, it’s not idling. The model it’s connected to is constantly looking at pixels and determining if they fit the category of human label assigned to them, and if so, if it can make out the direction of eyes looking at it before it signals the clock motors.
stopwatch / watchstop in memory of Bill Urmenyi