Vibe Check (2020)

Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald

As tracking and surveillance solutions are proposed to guide us through the current crisis, we enact another control system through the passive observation of our neighbors. Are they a threat, or essential to retaining our feeling of humanness? We notice our heightened sense of interdependence. Vibe Check appropriates common surveillance tools including face recognition and expression analysis to catalog the emotional effect exhibition visitors have on one another. Some are identified as evoking expressions of happiness, disgust, sadness, surprise, or boredom. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are playfully alerted to who these people are, and as they leave, they may find they’ve earned this distinction themselves.

Commissioned by HeK and MU for the context of the exhibition Real Feelings.

Setup

As a very first step, install Anaconda. Then follow the readme.md in each folder:

database/
app/
face/
automate/

Additional configuration

Disable all desktop notifications:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.notifications show-banners false

Status check

CPU should be busy: run htop and look for CPU activity.
GPUs should be busy: run nvidia-smi
Services should be running: cd automate && ./status
Logs should be updating journalctl -feu vibe-check-face
Cameras should be sending data (active) cd rpi && ./cameras status

Start-up and shut-down

Install XBindKeys:

sudo apt-get install xbindkeys xbindkeys-config
xbindkeys --defaults > /home/hek/.xbindkeysrc
xbindkeys-config

Add an action for control+shift + q pointing to:

bash /home/hek/Documents/vibe-check/automate/killall-chrome.sh

And for control+shift + c pointing to:

bash /home/hek/Documents/vibe-check/automate/open-chrome.sh

Set the machine to automatically reboot daily at 6am:

sudo crontab -e

Add the following line:

0 6   *   *   *    /sbin/shutdown -r +5