Butterfly’s Wing Dust

Butterfly’s Wing Dust is an interactive installation that explores the method of Daguerreotypy, the first publicly available photographic process (1839), and one of the most commonly used for almost twenty years.

With a Kinect installed inside an antique camera, our software mimics the exposure and development procedures to produce a visible image of the users. Although Louis Daguerre managed to create a permanent image using a camera, the exposure time was around 8 hours.  Since that would not be practical, we have limited the exposure time to only 15 seconds. With a simple gesture, the users are able to upload their photos to a dedicated photo gallery (weblink)