Generic

The spaces of contemporary capitalism

An animation showing how the program works

The Project

Generic is an interactive installation examining how we interact with supermodern architecture. The footage downloaded is based on the coordinates of the input destination's nearest airport. This means an endless cycle of flight footage, airport terminals and concrete wastelands are all that gets shown.

How it works
  1. The user interacts with the work through a keyboard.
  2. The user is prompted with a question and left to answer. The interface will only accept locations.
  3. The coordinates of the nearest airport closest to the original search string are found.These coordinates then inform a video search along with keywords to get a list of all travel related videos from that location.
  4. These videos are parsed and filtered for orientation, resolution and filesize. Only a few get through.
  5. These videos are then displayed along with their title and total viewcount. They are displayed as soon as they are found, meaning they are always at risk of change. The smaller display presents tourist advert stock footage of sunsets and beaches, with text giving you a clue as to where you are.
A blender rendering of the installation
The final setup
How it was made

This is almost entirely written in Python making heavy use of tkinter and OpenCv for on the fly video processing. I used the YouTube API for search processing and pytube for downloading.