Lost in the self

Lost in the self

Work created in 2025/11/22

'Lost in the self' is an internet-based art piece that repeatedly records and replays ten-second segments of everyday life captured through a webcam, generating music in real time as it analyzes the footage. While the title evokes Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), the work's true inquiry lies not in cross-cultural dislocation, but in the loss and rediscovery of the self in relation to technology.
At the core of the piece is a system that synchronizes image and sound seamlessly. Every ten seconds, footage recorded by the webcam is played back at 24fps—the frame rate of film—while a new ten-second recording proceeds in parallel, forming an infinite loop.
The video processing employs color grading reminiscent of Lost in Translation: saturation is reduced to 70%, a 15% sepia tone is added, and a slight hue rotation creates a cinematic nostalgia within ordinary scenes. A film-grain overlay with 15% opacity lends an analog texture to the digital image.
The music generation system is highly sophisticated. It extracts six parameters from the video: brightness, saturation, contrast, complexity (via edge detection), motion (frame differencing), and hue. These values are mapped through Tone.js into BPM, scale, melodic structure, rhythmic pattern, oscillator waveform, and ADSR envelope (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release).
A particularly noteworthy element is the algorithm for scale selection. The work includes ten musical scales—pentatonic, Dorian, Phrygian, blues, whole tone, Japanese scale, Heijo mode, Mixolydian, and harmonic minor—chosen according to a brightness-saturation matrix. High-brightness, high-saturation footage yields dramatic harmonic minor scales, while low-brightness, desaturated images produce melancholic minor pentatonics. This deterministic mapping recalls John Cage's chance operations, yet its reliance on algorithmic logic marks it as distinctly contemporary.
The piece's most important conceptual mechanism is its 'ten-second delay'. Viewers cannot see themselves as they are being recorded in the present; they always confront their image from ten seconds earlier. This temporal displacement technically reenacts the structure of self-recognition described in Jacques Lacan's mirror stage theory. The viewer identifies with the on-screen self, yet that self is already past, never fully aligned—a disjunction that lies at the heart of 'Lost in the self'.
Moreover, the infinite loop of recording and playback evokes the existential temporality found in Beckett's absurdist theatre and Warhol's repetitive video pieces. Time, segmented into ten-second units, loses its linear continuity, tearing the viewer between 'now-here' and 'then-there'.
The diversity of scales used in the system signals a critical stance toward Western musical centralism. By treating non-Western scales such as the Japanese pentatonic and Heijo mode on equal terms with the pentatonic and blues scales, the work dismantles cultural hierarchies in musical expression.
The correlation between 'color' and musical scale can also be interpreted as an extension of surrealist automatism into the audiovisual domain. Just as Breton sought to release words from the unconscious, this work explores a new kind of 'unconscious'—one mediated by algorithmic translation from image to sound without human intervention.
The 'Lost in Translation'-style color grading and film grain deliberately insert analog imperfections into digital footage. This is not mere nostalgia but a critique of digital media's transparency and timelessness. Film grain reintroduces materiality to the smooth digital image, foregrounding the medium itself.
Such an aesthetic can be viewed as an enactment of the media-archaeological approach proposed by Wolfgang Ernst and Jussi Parikka. By digitally reconstructing the tactile qualities of past media (film), the work visualizes the historical layers of media technology and the tension between analog and digital.
The work's strength lies in encapsulating complex algorithms within a minimalist interface. The viewer interacts with an advanced real-time processing system simply by pressing 'Start'. This democratic accessibility represents an ideal form of browser-based art.
However, certain aspects invite critical reflection. The logic that transforms visuals into sound is deterministic—identical footage always produces identical music. Though randomness introduces some diversity, the system remains confined within a closed causal loop, prompting questions about the true generativity of algorithmic art.
The ten-second unit also mirrors the temporal framework of modern social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram Stories. Whether the work maintains a critical distance from this compressed attention economy or unconsciously reproduces it remains ambiguous, giving the piece an ambivalent stance.
Ultimately, 'Lost in the self' stands upon layered contradictions: it uses digital technology to pursue analog texture, incorporates delay within real-time systems, and performs determinism while gesturing toward unpredictability. These tensions constitute the essence of the work, reflecting the complex entanglement between self and technology in contemporary existence.
Viewers gaze upon a self lost within the screen, fully aware that it belongs to the past. And when that past self resonates as music, they confront their own temporally, spatially, and sensorially divided being—the existential condition of the digital age.