Sascha Pohflepp got in touch to let me know about his final project at UDK in Berlin, titled Between Blinks & Buttons. Nice one Sascha.
Between Blinks & Buttons are two projects about the camera as a networked object. Through making their photos public on the internet, individuals create traces of themselves. In addition to their value as a memory, each image contains a multitude of information about the context of its creation. Cameras become context-recorders which create references that go well beyond taking a photo.
Through this metainformation, every image is linked to the precise moment in time when it was taken, making it possible to see what happened simultaneously in the world at that instant. This work tries to focus the user’s imagination on that other, to create narratives that run between one’s own memory and a stranger’s moment which happened to coincide in time.
Blinks is a table-top interactive, where projected photos are scattered on the surface. Placing a glass prism over a photo causes it to refract the light to the sides of the table. The really clever part, is that this light contains projections of other photos taken at exactly the same moment in other locations (the software searches Flickr using the api). The user can browse photos through fragments of time, and also upload their own photos via Bluetooth.
Buttons is camera that takes other peoples photos. Buttons has no optical input, by pressing the button you remember your moment, but it also retrieves the stored moment of others from the internet on Flickr. You then wait for a Flickr user to upload a photo taken at the same time as your moment. Created using a mobile phone, Mobile Processing and custom PHP code. Watch video. Great stuff.
