Candleshift, 2025
Candle, Webcam
Image processing: Collection of a candle flame's forms over the lifetime of the candle
This week's assignment for the MIT Media Lab's Drawing++ course was to create a generative drawing based on nature:
“Create a code based generative drawing that models something in nature, such as handwriting, grass, clouds, etc.”
I often light candles when I work to have something to stare into while lost in my thoughts, and I had recently noticed that the form of the candle flame was shockingly beautiful and dynamic.
Initially, I wanted to convert the shape of the candle flame into a series of contours to draw with my pen plotter, much as I did with my Emotion Data Postcard a few weeks prior, but I decided that I wanted to do something different, and especially try to avoid becoming overly reliant upon pen plotters for this course.
I decided to stick with the same basic idea, focusing on the form of the flame, but instead of drawing its contours, I instead overlaid the video with itself in order to dynamically show the progress of the flame down the candlestick and then back up as a tongue of flame blazing its final moment of glory.
In order to be able to iterate on the best setup, I used special fast burning candels: each one goes up in about 25 minutes. This allowed me to experiment with a range of different setups to best isolate the contour of the flame from the background.
This was unexpectedly complex as the flame's countour was surrounded by a bright salmon-colored halo that significantly shifted both the hue and value of the background seen through the halo, making a color-based mask for isolating the flame inconsistent.
The solution here was to use a piece of salmonish colored paper for the background that matched the hue of the halo. This meant that the halo did not significantly shift the hue of the background seen through it, but only increasing the background's color value. This way, I could make a mask removing all salmon hues from the image, regardless of their color value, removing both the dimmer background and brighter halo, all while keeping in the more yellow-orange hue of the flame itself.