{"id":243,"date":"2013-04-15T12:59:31","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T16:59:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/?p=243"},"modified":"2013-04-15T22:22:21","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T02:22:21","slug":"self-portrait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/2013\/04\/15\/self-portrait\/","title":{"rendered":"Self Portrait"},"content":{"rendered":"

As part of my sabbatical project, I \u00a0have been continuing to contemplate ways to visualize privacy.\u00a0My De-identification quilt<\/a> featured digitally-printed photos de-identified by their extreme magnification and by splicing them together with other fabric. Another approach to visual de-identification is pixelation. To pixelate an image, we superimpose a grid on the image and replace each cell with a color representing the average of all the pixels in that grid cell. Although\u00a0pixelation has been shown to be highly vulnerable to automated re-identification<\/a>, it is a widely used method of obscuring images to make them more difficult for humans to recognize.<\/p>\n

I have long been intrigued by the Salvador Dali paintings,\u00a0Lincoln in Dalivision<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1977) and\u00a0Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko)<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1976), which in turn were inspired by Leon Harmon’s grey photomoasic of Abraham Lincoln<\/a> (1973).<\/p>\n

Recently, Ray J released the single “I Hit it First” with a pixelated photo<\/a> on the album cover. The photo was quickly recognized as a 2010 photo of bikini-clad Kim Kardashian.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Original portrait<\/p><\/div>\n

While working on my Big Bright Pixels<\/a> quilt, people kept asking me whether there was a hidden picture or message. There wasn’t. But that did get me thinking about doing a pixel quilt with a hidden image. But what image should I pixelate? I had recently used a pixelated face in the\u00a0logo<\/a>\u00a0I designed for the Privacy Engineering masters program<\/a>, and a face seemed a natural choice given that faces are commonly pixelated to protect privacy in news photos. (Other body parts are also frequently pixelated, and I love the censorship towel<\/a>, but I digress.) I settled on pixelating a face, and briefly considered using a face of a famous person before deciding to use my own face. I selected a blue-haired portrait, photographed by Chuck Cranor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Pixelated<\/a>

Pixelated portrait<\/p><\/div>\n

Pixelation can be done trivially with a computer using standard image processing software packages or by rolling your own. I started working on my pixelated quilt before I started programing in Processing, so I used Photoshop to pixelate a headshot of myself. The initial pixelation was nice, but I wanted something more colorful and also higher contrast so that the differences between colors would show up better when printed on fabric (digital printing on fabric tends to dull colors). I experimented with adjusting the contrast, brightness, and color settings in Photoshop until I came up with a brighter and more colorful pixelated image. This was the image I sent to Spoonflower<\/a> for digital printing.<\/p>\n

\"Pixelated<\/a>

Pixelated portrait with high contrast and color manipulation<\/p><\/div>\n

By the time the fabric arrived I had gotten busy with other quilts, and I was also a little disappointed in how the printed fabric looked, so I left the fabric sitting out on my table in the STUDIO for a while. I decided that the dulled digital print needed some more punch, so periodically I cut a fabric square to match a pixel in the fabric and pinned it in place. I cut some of these squares from translucent polyester organza, adding some vibrancy and shimmer to the pixels over which I layered them. I cut other squares from lace, commercial batiks, and printed fabrics that were more intense versions of the hues in the digital print. I ended up covering about 20% of the pixels with other fabric.<\/p>\n

\"Back<\/a>

Back of quilt top with vertical lines sewed<\/p><\/div>\n

After a few months of staring at the pixels I finally decided to sew the quilt together. I used a shortcut technique to sew the quilt together without actually cutting apart the squares in the digital print. I folded the fabric along one of the vertical lines, catching the pinned squares in the fold, and stitched along the line with a quarter-inch seam allowance. I repeated this approach to sew all the vertical lines and pressed all the seam allowances to the side. Then I folded the fabric along one of the horizontal lines and repeated this process. The end result was a pieced quilt top that appeared to have been pieced out of 130 2.25″ squares (2.75″ with seam allowances). Theoretically this approach should have resulted in precisely pieced seams; however, some of the lines are actually slightly off and the rows and columns did not come out quite as square as I had hoped they would.<\/p>\n

\"Pieced<\/a>

Pieced quilt top<\/p><\/div>\n

I layered the quilt top over batting and backing and used a spiral free-motion machine quilting pattern to quilt the whole thing free hand. I did the quilting in several sessions as I had time, doodling spirals until my hands got tired. I used several different thread colors to roughly match the color of the thread with the pixels I was quilting. I decided not to bind this quilt, and instead made an envelope and quilted all the way to the edge. There is a little bit of stippled hand quilting done with perl cotton surrounding my signature in the lower right corner.<\/p>\n

So now the quilt is done and I’m pretty happy with this self portrait. Most people who have seen it do not recognize it as a self portrait, which is ok, and sort of the point. On the other hand, Golan said the blue and purple hair was a dead give away for him. I had not actually started out with the intention to make a self portrait, but ultimately I think the piece works better for me as a self portrait than any more accurate likeness would.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Self Portrait, machine pieced and quilted 23×30.75″<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of my sabbatical project, I \u00a0have been continuing to contemplate ways to visualize privacy.\u00a0My De-identification quilt featured digitally-printed photos de-identified by their extreme magnification and by splicing them together with other fabric. Another approach to visual de-identification is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14,4],"tags":[8,12,22,26,19,11,16,6,7],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy","category-quilts","category-sabbatical-2","tag-art","tag-blue-hair","tag-color","tag-computation","tag-fabric-printing","tag-finished","tag-privacy-2","tag-quilt","tag-staybattical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorrie.cranor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}