Phoenix Sweeney

Form Me: Augmenting Dysphoria

PRESS RELEASE:

My name is Phoenix Sweeney, & I'm doing my first solo show on December 8th & 9th at Wow Cafe Theater.

Form Me: Augmenting Dysphoria is a live augmented reality performance piece playing with the overlap between gender, identity formation, & bodies.

Event page

Ticket page

I MADE SOME GIFS, WOAH:

Augmenting Dysphoria 3

So this week I worked on getting a few more models & tracking images ready, as well as fixing scaling & trying to get different physics/animation to work.

I also started thinking about promotional materials, so I'm using the image below & the animation above to create an augmented poster to get people interested in the event.

This weekend I am prepping my physical materials. Over break I will be finishing the narrative, finalizing all the tracking images, & figuring out how to wear & break them in the performance

Here's my workspace:

I can demo how the trackers are currently working later in class.

Augmenting Dysphoria 2

I used tracking images that are a combination of generic fire or gender stock image type things & images of work created by other trans artists.

The models are all my own creations.

I need to still add cloth systems/physics to my models & play around more with the tracking.

My workspace looks like this rn:

Here are my target images:

 Amos Mac

Amos Mac 

 Candy Darling

 Del Lagrace

 Greer Lankton

 Greer Lankton

 Heather Cassils

Vaginal Davis

Zackary Drucker

Here's some images of a few of the models:

They have different materials, but these are just using with Maya default lambert.

I am also using the photogrammetry I showed last week.

Augmenting Dysphoria

This week I redid the photogrammetry (I'm still going to redo it, hopefully for the last time), made some audio, & developed more concepts for the performance.

Photogrammetry:

Rigging:

Working on it, so far importing the rigging into Unity is not working nor is rigging in Unity. I'm gonna focus on it more once I have my next round of photogrammetry finished.

Sounds:

Performance: 

Imma do this part live in class, then put the video here, cool?

I need to practice actually doing this shit in front of other human beans, so lesgo.

Transar2

I started working on affirmations like this pal:

Then I threw out that idea entirely.

Now I'm going to do a performative installation where I will be performing dysphoria. While I'm performing, there will be an augmented projection of me in the space. I'm using photogrammetry to get a model of myself which will be bubbling & melting as it follows my motion.




I played this as a reference:

Dys4ia

Then I spent approximately a thousand years trying to get the Kinect I'm using to work with Unity, so here's that:

Here's a less good test that I did before that, don't even watch this tbh:

I also worked on photogrammetry, which went...well, it happened? Here's how that turned out:

I had trouble with Agisoft Photoscan, so I used Autodesk ReMake.

I'm redoing it on Wednesday. Moving on.




Finally, I concepted how the performance would look, & here's the first video of that:

I am going to play around a lot more with narrative structure, but right now I'm mainly examining this idea of augmenting myself irl in this "gender is performative" type notion while the digitally augmented self is existing as more of an internal reaction to physicality & gender.

Transar1

Installation narrative

1. Social dysphoria

2. Body dysphoria

3. Rejection

4. Affirmation

5. Avatar creator

6. Dysphoria coaching

This weekend we'll be working on the depth mask in Kinect & creating the social dysphoria augment from there.

Right now we've been working in Processing & Maya for Kinect, but we may switch to working primarily in Unity for Kinect, which we'll also be figuring out this weekend.

I spent most of the week planning our installation & configuring our projects to work together & coming up with samples for the affirmations & body dysphoria

Vuforia Augment

I spent most of my time working on reasearching for my final project, so I didn't troubleshoot this much.

Everything worked fine, the model was just kinda wonky.

I put a model of a vulva on the first image from my concepts.

Concepts~(*.*)~

Goodbye to Halos

Micha Cardenas Second Life - Becoming Dragon

Pariah

Zackary Drucker Don't Look at Me Like That

Sophie LaBelle Assigned Male Comics

Greer Lankton

desert shadow 22

me

getting thru space

at sunset speed

desert shadow 27

I go in white

I cum-bak in red

(albatross skulls

are my guide)

allme 5

this fire

hits me in the chest

(transformation)

Trans themes in The Matrix by Hannah DuVoix

Zackary Drucker

06 This Is What It Looks Like (To Go From One Thing to Everything)

Collaboration with Luke Gilford

2013

One thought lead us here

Reborn and taken

I am the lover inside of you; the barrier between us too

One room leads to the next and we end where we started

We are invisible but full of something

We want to be all of you

We want to look at you and see it dissolve

My decisions have lead me past your territory

And that makes me free

Kyuin Shim

Kyuin Shim

horror web 6min from zackary drucker on Vimeo.
Zackary Drucker The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See is a live performance that takes form as a group meditation. Viewers are directed, by a disembodied voice, through a series of breathing exercises, new-age visions, and dark, dysphoric confessions, all the while being instructed to pluck out the hair from an androgynous, stripped body in the center of the gallery.

Yishay Garbasz Becoming

Where Physical Meets Digital, Zouassi

Little messages in random places to console you from overall unease with a changing identity & an increasingly closed world.



Zackary Drucker  03 BEFORE/AFTER

Heather Cassils Becoming an Image

Let's Call This a GeoLayer

I did this. We can't win 'em all, folks.

I had high hopes & very little time. Shwoops.

Intervention

Illusion of Choice

The notion of brand preference & choosing where your money goes is basically bullshit.

Almost every consumer product is made by about 10 different companies, so unless you do your research, buy local (which is increasingly difficult), or luck out, your money is almost certainly funding some corporate empire.

You can see this illustrated here with just a few of the names that fall under the massive conglomerate Unilever.

Watch the demo below:

& Here is the video from the link:

Memory

Nightmare

I've always had recurring dreams. There are a few in particular that I remember quite vividly. When I was young, I used to dream I was in a nearly empty cement room, filled with a single hanging light and one of those water torture cells Houdini used in the classic escaping a tank of water in a straight jacket trick, except rather than water the tank was filled with hair. The tank was also filled with me. I would dream I was drowning in this tank of hair in this dark empty room fairly frequently.

While from my perspective in the dream I was always flailing, trying to scream and, well, dying, the room always remained placid. Here is outside the tank.

I used a light and a crate that I found on cgtrader.com, then I textured the crate like a tank. Then I found a grime texture image for the floor, & a hair texture image for inside the tank.