Antonio De Rosa’s Instagram Socialmatic Project concept.
In the age of cell phones and other mobile devices with network and photographic capabilities, the art of taking photographs has become as daily a process as brushing one’s teeth or walking to work or school. In a sense, the art of photography has been lost in the phrase “everything that can be made, can be made social.” The ubiquity of the camera, assuming the form and shape of objects that we carry with us daily, has turned the act of taking a photo into an everyday duty rather than an artistic rendering. In addition, the advent of 80% of a global population carrying around a video and still image recording device with them daily has led to an overabundance of information and media gathering.
Responding to the challenge of transforming the traditional act of photography into something new that utilizes the strengths of the internet, artists are creating projects that not only question what it means to take a picture, but also to share and collaborate on the meaning of photography as it’s evolving in the world of Web 2.0. Within the context of crowdsourcing, two projects take advantage of the multitudes of human thought and expression circulating through the internet.
The Descriptive Camera, created by Matt Richardson, works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.
As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they’re doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don’t yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities.
A rare fisheye Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 lens, which offers the “world’s most extreme wide-angle” and is worth £100,000, has gone on sale at Gray’s of Westminster in London.
First introduced in 1970 at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany, the Fisheye-Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 lens offers an angle of view of 220º making it, at the time, the “world’s most extreme wide-angle lens to cover an image area of 24x36mm.
Hamburg´s garbagemen portrait their city in the Trashcam Project – with their garbage containers. Standard 1.100 liter containers are transformed to giant pinhole cameras. With these cameras the binmen take pictures of their favorite places to show the beauty and the changes of the city they keep clean every day. The Trashcam Project was developed by Christoph Blaschke, Mirko Derpmann, Scholz & Friends Berlin and the Hamburg sanitation department. Special thanks to Hamburg based photographer Matthias Hewing (www.matthiashewing.de/) for his professional advice and the challenging lab work with the giant negatives.
Garbageman Hans-Dieter Braatz is taking a picture with a 1.100 liter garbage container transformed into a pinhole camera. It will take 2 minutes of framing and one hour waiting. Picture taken by Mirko Derpmann with a fuji gw690 on Fuji Velvia.
St. Georg is a part of Hamburg where one can find clear signs of gentrification and quite an organized oppositional movement. This site should be occupied by a massive glass and steel cube by now. But somehow the process seems to have slowed down mostly due to the financial crisis. Photographed with a pinhole garbage container by garbageman Roland Wilhelm, Christoph Blaschke and Mirko Derpmann. Shot on a 106×80 cm sheet of ilford multigrade with 10 minutes exposure time. In the front you can see the shadow of the bin.
The Fleetschloss in Hamburg photographed with a pinhole garbage container by
garbageman Hans-Dieter Braatz, Christoph Blaschke and Mirko Derpmann. Shot on a 106×80 cm sheet of ilford multigrade with 45 minutes exposure time.
Velocommerce is commerce that is dependent on the bicycle (from the French word ‘velo’ referring to bicycle). India is a fantastic place to observe velocommerce in action.This project has opened our eyes to this crazy universe of activities, products, services, design, economy and humanity that is mobile using bicycles. The interesting thing about being on a bicycle is that it immediately frees you as an entrepreneur from the shackles of immovable real estate. Velocommerce is all about the mobility of property, and it challenges notions of ownership and private capital. It is special because it exists at the intersection of entrepreneurship, mobility, sustainability, grassroots innovation, cultures, local economies and decentralized, last-mile service delivery.
“We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.
A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.”
‘The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action. It sees itself as a dynamic paradox, flowing between the pure and the applied, the existential and the deterministic, and the holy and the profane. It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world, and other people and ourselves. It’s a place to build objects or totems, religions or websites, revolutions or business models, paintings, or galaxies.
The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks however to reject the Kantian division between the pure and the applied arts. Since ‘god is dead’ and ‘the spectacle’ is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet.
The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds including designers, artists, bankers, skeptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists, and the curious.’
This self portrait from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows dust accumulation on the rover’s solar panels as the mission approached its fifth Martian winter. The dust reduces the rover’s power supply, and the rover’s mobility is limited until the winter is over or wind cleans the panels.
This is a mosaic of images taken by Opportunity’s panoramic camera (Pancam) during the 2,111th to 2,814th Martian days, or sols, of the rover’s mission (Dec. 21 to Dec. 24, 2011). The downward-looking view omits the mast on which the camera is mounted.
The portrait is presented in approximate true color, the camera team’s best estimate of what the scene would look like if humans were there and able to see it with their own eyes.
Opportunity has worked through four Martian southern hemisphere winters since it landed in in January 2004 about 14 miles (23 kilometers) northwest of its current location. Closer to the equator than its twin rover, Spirit, Opportunity has not needed to stay on a sun-facing slope during the previous winters. Now, however, Opportunity’s solar panels carry a thicker coating of dust, and the team is using a strategy employed for three winters with Spirit: staying on a sun-facing slope. The sun will pass relatively low in the northern sky from the rover’s perspective for several months of shortened daylight before and after the southern Mars winter solstice on March 30, 2012. Opportunity is conducting research while located on the north-facing slope of a site called “Greeley Haven.”
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.
Text and Image viaNASA
Isabel M. Martinez: According to quantum mechanics we have forty conscious moments per second, and our brains connect this sequence of nows to create the illusion of the flow of time. So, what would things look like if that intermittence was made visible? This body of work explores that hiccup, that blink, that ubiquitous fissure in the falling-into-place of things.
In my work I attempt to articulate something in between the freezing of time—that so often characterizes photography—and its relentless passing. I hint towards temporalities that are fluid, speculative, and somewhat loose. I am looking for the line that divides the finite (probability) from the infinite (possibility). If time is a succession of instants, I want to see what lies in between them.
I am after the gaps between instants of consciousness.
The photographs in Quantum Blink are composed of two exposures taken instants apart. The striped pattern is the result of masks placed in-camera, this feature allows me to blend two images together and at the same time keep them from fully fusing onto one another. Each photograph holds a brief sense of continuity, almost like an animation, slightly cinematographic. Though they provide a notion of movement and progression, you cannot tell which of the two starts it and which one ends it. In person, these photo-based works appear to shift and change depending on the distance and the angle from which they are seen; an illusion of volume may become apparent, while other times it may seem as though there are three images at play.
A towering dust devil casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this image acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona. Via NASA
Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of a human sperm fertilizing a human egg. The sperm has fused to the egg cell membrane (oolemma) prior to becoming incorporated almost completely into the egg. The zona pellucida has been removed in this preparation. The surface of the egg is covered with dense microvilli. Once the sperm has fused to the egg cell membrane the “zona reaction” takes place which prevents other sperm from entering the egg. Credit: Yorgos Nikas. Wellcome Images. Via Science Museum
Jen Osborne:“While living in Vancouver I resided in the demonized area known as the Downtown Eastside (DTES). I worked part-time in some of the residential housing programs and produced this series as an independent photographer. I met some of these drug-addicted subjects through work, met others at bars or in the street in front of my apartment. I am always impressed by these particular women on various levels. They are very complicated, and have been through tremendously damaging experiences.
Despite their difficult pasts, they are funny, humorous and loving people whom are much more vulnerable than I first expected. My subjects often display such strength and power. The discovery of their fragility lead me to wonder how they physically present themselves to the world in order to feel safer or get what they need to survive. In photographing these women, both before and after they dress for the day. I wanted to communicate the idea of vulnerability and women’s presentation of one’s self to the world. All of us dress accordingly because we are all vulnerable and want to come across in our respective desired way.
The DTES contains many people who are very good at heart and some may resort to illegal behavior such as prostituting, drug-dealing, stealing and car-jacking. I want to speak of the hardship linked to illegal activity by photographing this transition into the alter-ego. These outfits often help these women dodge the police because they become unrecognizable after they finish dealing drugs, panhandling or sex-working.”
J.Scriba is a media artist, physicist and photographer from Germany. The images above are part of his [situ art] projects.
He says: “I use the term [situ art] to refer to art created at or in relation to a specific place (“in situ”). However, these projects at public places like airports, railway stations or office buildings don’t portrait concrete venues but rather capture the essence of a situation: a gathering of people linked by common goals or interests and the desire to communicate with each other and their surroundings.”
Dragoş Lumpan: I started this project for several reasons. The first was curiosity. Travelling by train or by car I have seen sheep in the fields. Sometimes I have played “sheep” – that is a sort of Romulus and Remus numbering game, but with sheep. Close to the sheep was a shepherd. I was curious to know more about shepherds: where they sleep, what they eat, what they do during all day long, during the entire year … I have found out that there are shepherds who roam every day with their sheep, hundreds of kilometres in a year, who sleep wherever the night covers them, under the sky, regardless of the season. They live in a different realm, in a different time, following a quasi-cosmic calendar. Yet, from time to time, we come across them.
Another reason is that I like cheese. It seems that cheese is one of the oldest staples of Romanian exports. Etymologically the word “cheese” originates most probably from the Geto-Dacian language; it was adopted by almost all the languages that surround us. The Slavonic languages use bryndza; this word entered into German as Brinse, Brimsenkäse in dialect. Sometimes it appears as Brinzenkäse. In German Käse means cheese, so that, most probably, the word is a tautology. However, this product is usually thought of as coming from Switzerland, from a town named Brinz, so that Brinzen-Käse could have meant “the cheese from the town of Brinz”. The most likely hypothesis is that the city was named after the staple it exported. That staple was prepared by the Romanian shepherds. In Southern France the word brousse is used for cottage cheese. Its etymology seems to be the Romanian word brânza that reached France via Switzerland”. (The Dictionary of Travelling Words by Alexandru Graur). Due to my visual arts background, I have tried to narrate the story of cheese and its authors in my language, that is to say through images.
The third reason is the extinction of transhumance. Due to social changes, shepherds do not want to be shepherds anymore. Or, at least, they do not want to travel every day, every year, throughout their lives. Shepherding is more than a job. It is a hard way of life. It is very intense. Fewer and fewer shepherds are prepared to make the sacrifice.The title of this project “The Last Transhumance” came from a Romanian shepherding family which had been travelling for generations. I followed them for 18 months. After that they told me they wanted to give up transhumance, or “transformance” as they were calling it. They have remained shepherds, but now they are sedentary ones. In the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran we read that: “Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a worker of the ground”. Ancestrally, somewhere along the line, we all had a shepherd in our families. We are witnessing the extinction of an ancient way of life, when people were content to live around a camp fire. I cannot stop the fire from going out, but I can try to record its dying embers.
BeetleCam is a remote controlled buggy with a DSLR camera mounted on top. After the first model was destroyed by a lion, Will Burrard-Lucas created a new model one with more advanced capabilities and an armored shell.
Last Days of the Arctic: a moving and insightful photographic portrait of a disappearing landscape and the Inuit people who inhabit it, by celebrated photojournalist Ragnar Axelsson.
Inspired by the fast – diminishing way of life of communities dependent on nature and the land around them for survival, Axelsson presents us with a breathtaking introduction to a life of Greenlandic hunters in one of the most remote regions of the world, and at once demonstrates its temporality.
As the world turns its gaze toward the Arctic; the landscape whose inhabitants have done the least to cause climate change is where the devastating effects are most visible. Their ancient culture is set to become extinct; the probability of these communities continuing to live traditionally is becoming increasingly unlikely. In his native Iceland, Ragnar looked at the fishermen and farmers of remote villages and thought if he did not photograph them, then no one would know they ever existed. It is this thought that has led to this unique body of work captured in Greenland, with unprecedented access to a community that rarely let outsiders in.
Presented by Proud Chelsea, Last Days of the Arctic is a unique photo-reportage exhibition including these exceptional photographs of a society in its twilight, the awe inspiring landscapes they live in and the unique hunting rituals which are part of their cultural identity.
Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself.
Seen at a depth thousands of times more faint than the dimmest visible star, tens of millions of other suns appear, still perhaps only a hundredth of one percent thought to exist in our galaxy alone. Our Milky Way galaxy is the dominant feature, its dusty arms sweeping through the frame, punctuated by red clouds of glowing hydrogen. To the lower right are our nearest neighbors, each small galaxies themselves with their own hundreds of millions of stars.
Johan Bergstrom: The work Pagan Postcards takes the ideologies of Norwegian black metal as its starting point. In a series of images fragments of lyrics are taken out of their context to be projected on norwegian scenery, the same scenery that served as inspiration for a new wave of black metal. Instead of embracing the characteristic dark and symbolic visual codes of black metal, the sceneries here are displayed in the manner of Romanticism and influenced by Norwegian romanticist painters like Johan Christian Dahl, Hans Gude and August Cappelen. Many of the ideas that defined Romanticism could two hundred years later be found in the manifestoes of Black Metal. For all of its violence and misanthropy, black metal is a deeply romantic movement and this is nowhere more evident that in their hymns to nature.
This underground music scene became worldwide notorious through sensationalized media reports on a series of symbolic acts of violence. The second wave of Black Metal, emerging in Norway in the early 1990s, gave expression to a more aggressive and incarnated satanic or heathen ideology than their predecessors. Bands like Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal, Emperor, Ensalved and Thorns came to define what soon would be labeled as True Norwegian Black Metal. The scene´s quest for authenticity triggered an arms race that ended up in suicide, murders and church burnings. All in favor of appearing as the most evil, or the most “true”. Besides the anti-Christian mindset and an opposition to modern society in general, black metal is fixated with notions of a idealized pre-Christian past. It desires a transformation of the self into a new/old version of humanity that back metalers believe is empowered, violent and inseparably linked to the harshness and amorality of nature. By placing almost exclusive emphasis on emotion, sensory experience and mysticism, black metal rejects the basic tenets of the Enlightenment.
In less extreme, still resembling philosophy, the Romanticism movement celebrated independence of human spirit and the supremacy of feeling. Romanticist artists investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the mysterious, the occult, the diseased and the satanic. In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation and awe—especially that which was experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities.
Through sampling and remixing the work Pagan Postcards takes an open-ended and ambiguous shape, on the one hand hinting an approaching apocalypse and on the other hand celebrating the grandeur of nature. It gives a voice to the gloomy moods of contemporary society in the wake of financial crises, natural disasters, wars and acts of terror as well as to a rising back-to-nature movement.
Perhaps geometrical forms inside our organism are not that good.
Scanning Electron Micrograph of the surface of a kidney stone showing tetragonal crystals of Weddellite (calcium oxalate dihydrate) emerging from the amorphous central part of the stone. Horizontal length of the picture represents 0.5 mm of the figured original (30 KV, image number 15).
Jihyun Ryou is interested in food preservation. According to her:
“Observing the food and therefore changing the notion of food preservation, we could find the answer to current situations such as the overuse of energy and food wastage. My design is a tool to implement that knowledge in a tangible way and slowly it changes the bigger picture of society. I believe that once people are given a tool that triggers their minds and requires a mental effort to use it, new traditions and new rituals can be introduced into our culture.”
This project is about traditional oral knowledge which has been accumulated from experience and transmitted by mouth to mouth. Particularly focusing on the food preservation, it looks at a feasible way of bringing that knowledge into everyday life.
Through the research into the current situation of food preservation, I’ve learned that we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator. We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it.
Therefore my design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food, which is closer to nature. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connection between different levels of living beings, we as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings.
Through the objects of everyday life, design can introduce traditional oral knowledge into people’s lives through their experience of using it. Objects make invisible knowledge evident.
Jon Rafman: One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.
The Art of Google Books was conceived by Krissy Wilson after spending a great deal of time sifting through Google’s digitized books, trying to match the texts of exposed binder’s waste in nineteenth century children’s books with their texts of origin.
The aim of this project is twofold; to recognize book digitization as rephotography, and to value the signs of use that accompany these texts as worthy of documentation and study.
Ultimately, the startling and diverse adversaria of Google Books merits examination and exhibition.
Magda Gallery: Yongliang is a resident of Shanghai, China who depends heavily on his a camera and a laptop computer to make his art. Using only these tools—and a knowledge of traditional Chinese painting traditions—Yongliang invents urban scenes that depict skyscrapers under construction, freeway systems, electrical power plants, and bustling urban corridors. His compositions starkly reveal the impacts of technological progress that China has undergone over past decades.
Yongliang is among a generation of young artists who came of age after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and therefore embraces a level of artistic freedom that is not common among past generations of Chinese artists.
Yang Yongliang combines ancient Chinese art techniques, such as shui mo painting and calligraphy, with photographic elements of modern urban Shanghai, arranged in the traditional composition of Chinese landscape, to produce artworks with a perfect balance between fragility and danger, beauty and cruelty.
A look inside the B&H conveyor system, the efficient NYC system that takes items you pick up in one part of the store directly to the checkout for you.
“Wifi Camera,” Sjölén, Haque, Somolai-Fischer, 2006.
Antonio De Rosa’s Instagram Socialmatic Project concept. 
Electronic Instant Camera,” 2011.
Horns, Uummannaq, West Greenland, 1998
Dog on a Chain, Sermiliqaq, East Greenland, 1997
Scanning Electron Micrograph of the surface of a kidney stone showing tetragonal crystals of Weddellite (calcium oxalate dihydrate) emerging from the amorphous central part of the stone. Horizontal length of the picture represents 0.5 mm of the figured original (30 KV, image number 15).
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