Gaze

“Gaze” takes the form of an interactive web app in which the audience can engage. Using their microphones and webcams, they can create their own personal drone scapes made of both imagery and sound.Users can also capture and save their unique result of the artwork to an online gallery,held on BITROT’s website.
The release is accompanied by a photo series taken by the photographer Malthe Ivarsson. Using “Gaze” Malthe has made a collection of abstract and dreamy photos which is available on the project’s series page.

"Arash Akbari's new audio-visual project Gaze has a simple purpose: to create a personalised dronescape that converts your distinct experiences into a custom electronic world warped through its digital lens, using your microphone and camera setup irrespective of device and indeed of location to provide a uniquely modified aural and visual version of your surroundings. Sights become a kaleidoscopic miasma of slow-motion eeriness, capable of being customised with a variety of different filters and intensity options that range from the dark and creepy to unsaturated and sepia tones that seem lost in time, whatever seems best to suit the present atmosphere.
Its slow capture speed makes frames fuse and bleed into one another, movements captured in fleeting smears as life flickers by. Many strange and ethereal views are possible and can be captured and saved to your device or uploaded to an online gallery alongside other users, permanising these strange views for others to share in.
Meanwhile, the mainstay of the project lies in its manipulation of sound, using your microphone to not only smear and reprocess the various environmental sounds around you but also the ones that are not, introducing mysterious and organic genesis into the randomness of microphone noise, creating life where there is only digital emptiness.
Imperfections in your hardware therefore give rise to a glowing fuzz of soft drones that bring a gentle reminder of universal activity to even the quietest and most inactive places. Elsewhere, louder and more dynamic surrounds create more demanding noises, generating occasionally harsh and intrusive electronic flangings that disturb the otherwise peaceful and placid movements they're embedded in, like the wash of big sound ships churning the still drone water.
The question remains not of what Gaze can create for you, but where you will take it and what fresh, altered perceptions it will provide for you in those spaces, twisting your sense of local reality and giving you your own personal and living drone record to complement your life as it does so."
Chris Doherty-Ingram

Reviews:
"The interactive mirror has been a long-running staple of digital art, but its form came in galleries – Mac minis and the like stuck to walls. Now, transposed to the browser, the form becomes oddly personal and intimate. We stare into our computer screen all day. For a fleeting moment, it can look back."
Review on Motherboard Vice
Review on Roar Magazine
Gaze Installation at colomboscope2016

Chrome Experiments Page
The project's archive on Instagram