Into the Neverlands

Obama inauguration photosynth


Obama inauguration photosynth

A more interesting take CNN used on Barack Obama's inauguration today (following the now legendary Jessica Yellin's hologram) is a tool developed by Microsoft called Photosynth: thousands and possibly millions of pictures taken in the same place shape a visual 3D space through which you can navigate.

Such networked photographing and publishing of photos might completely change our way of experiencing the visual in the future. (Shame I couldn't download Silverlight on my Mac PowerBook...)

There is a superb talk on that on Ted (scroll to middle of the speech to see the remarkable 3D look of Notre Dame de Paris):



PS once again - yes we did

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In a forthcoming book Dutch visual culture theorist Anneke Smelik says that ‘art and popular culture sometimes stride ahead of academia’. The book is Doing Gender in Media, Art, and Culture (Buikema R., Van der Tuin I., eds., To be published by Routledge, 2009). A virtual friend of mine told me sssh about these guys, but I can't help it - Facebook is a bad place to post secrets.


Lina exhibited | MMIX

When I saw my friend's new profile picture on Facebook I thought damn she's famous. It was a bit like this one - yet with her portrait all over the gallery walls. Photofunia allows to visualise your 15 minutes of fame. All one needs is mug shot. What previously was possible to Photoshop prodigies has become networked.

Judging by their LiveJournal blog it seems that the the fun makers from Odessa, Ukraine, as they call themselves are increasing the number of possible styles you can acquire: Surrealism, Macho, God Father, Drag, Warhol, etc...

Photofunia also expresses a loyal admiration to one of the most popular comedians in the post-Soviet plateaus - Yevgeny Petrosyan - he is one of the main faces in the montages (as you might know, the second largest community on LiveJournal is Russian - or more precisely those who write in Russian).

I guess, Warhol once again has been proven right - in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And it's documented this time.

PS have you noticed that Roman numerals for 2009 make up the word MIX?

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krazydad/jbum photo

Stumbled across this one while fishing in Visual Complexity.

Julian Stallabrass includes an insightful essay on the digitalisation of visual culture 'Sixty Billion Sunsets' in his book Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, published more than a decade ago, yet still making a lot of sense.

Sunsets are some of the most popular subjects in photo banks. I just found 4 556 234 of them on Flickr and 3 117 531 on Picasa. They're mostly highly saturated, with the colours so sticky sweet you want to dip the fingers in them is if they were jars with marmalade.

The photo-graph consists of 150 00 pictures with a tag 'sunset' and demonstrates the manufacturing of the sunset. Krazydad provides a more thorough explanation of his graph.

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