In collaboration with Fiona Wang

Project title

Digital Object Archive & Collage Card Generator

One sentence description:

A webcam-based application that captures, categorizes, and archives physical objects from your physical environment into a digital collection, which can then be arranged into collages with Ai generated narrative and exported as personal artworks.

Project abstract:

This project explores the relationship between physical possessions and digital memory by creating a playful system for collecting/archiving everyday objects. Using a webcam, users can capture photographs of items from their immediate environment, such as a empty juice bottle, a snack packaging, a loose piece of paper, a clothing tag, a receipt…etc. The model will capture a photo of the object and remove the background color (green screen, or any solid color). Then, MobileNet's image classification will categorizes each item, into folders like "bottles," "paper," "packaging," “fruit”..etc. Once objects are collected, users can enter a collage-making mode where they can drag and drop their archived items onto a blank canvas, arranging them into visual compositions. This process transforms the act of hoarding from accumulation into curation. Users will be encouraged to reconsider the importance of these hoarded objects in relation to one another spatially and narratively. The final step is to ask an LLM (OpenAI or Gemini API) to generate a short poetic narrative based on the objects in the collage. The AI becomes a co-author, finding unexpected connections and stories within the user's collection. Text is overlaid on the composition, and the final piece can be downloaded as a PNG. The big idea behind this project is to ask “what does it mean to collect in a digital space?” “What stories emerge when we let machines help us make sense of our hoarded objects?”

Inspiration:

Jane: I became interested in this idea because I have been a hoarder all my life. I want to create a project that allows me to contain my physical hoard in a digital space and make use out of it. For as long as I can remember, I had been deeply fascinated by my surroundings and the material world. I remember my time in kindergarten where I would spend my recess picking out wood chips from the sandbox and bottle caps from the grass. I would come home with pockets full of these discoveries and my mother would scold me for picking up the so-called “garbage”. I secretly collected these items in boxes hidden behind my closet because I sensed an energetic vitality within these items. Inspired by Jane Bennett’s idea in Vibrant Matter that all objects, animate or inanimate, deserve “attentiveness, or even ‘respect’” (preface ix), I began to see my possessions not only as objects but as participants in my life. These items aid us in our everyday lives and possess their own agency, influencing and even controlling our behaviors and emotions. That is why in recent years I have been weaving my hoarding habits within my artworks, as it is both a form of reflection and release (transforming the emotional weight of these objects into a shared narrative).

In this class, I learned how machine learning can “see” and “categorize” the world and how models like MobileNet or image classifiers mimic human attention. That inspired me to merge my hoarding instincts with digital systems of classification. By digitizing my collection, I want to explore how AI might help us reframe accumulation as reflection. Instead of drowning in things, we can dialogue with them. We can curate, reinterpret, and perhaps even find poetry in what we once thought was junk.

Fiona: My interest in digital hoarding emerges from a tendency to accumulate data in digital spaces. I have never been a very organized person, whether in my physical space or in my digital life. Objects, files, screenshots, and notes often end up scattered everywhere. I know that many of these objects no longer serve a practical purpose, I still find it difficult to discard them. This unwillingness to eliminate objects extends into my digital world, where my images, links, notes, and documents accumulated into an informal archive, even though they are unorganized, this growing collection forms an ongoing record of my daily life and attention. By turning my hoarded objects into a digital collection, I can look at them with curiosity rather than guilt, and reshape disorder into a creative and meaningful process. Therefore this project allows us to explore and question the way we value discard or “meaningless” objects, and to reflect on whether digital tools might help us learn to reinterpret the act of hoarding.

Project reference of digital archives:

Every Shot Every Episode - Jennifer and Kevin McCoy (2001)