Make Yourself Transparent

by Adam Rokhsar

When I was a therapist, my supervisor taught me that engulfment was the experience of feeling absorbed or swallowed up by another person.

Here is an exploration of engulfment by a machine: watch as the computer finds my face using automatic face detection, and then recursively averages it until each pixel becomes entirely white.

As the amount of whiteness increases, the sampling rate and bit depth of the audio decreases– this means that fewer and fewer samples of sound are taken, and that each sample is increasingly constrained to fewer values.

The original audio is the sound of an empty room, and the air conditioning.