User:Mirjam Dissel/writing assignment

Man on a Beach, Posing

WHAT
I recreated the narrative in a Dutch private photo album from the late 1920's, by replacing the pictures with a matching description typed in dymo tape. The removed pictures are hung in frames on the wall, themed together. The story in the album starts out plain and descriptive, the page is almost black, except for two small descriptions like "man on a beach, posing. boat in sea.". The reader does not know anything about the people starring in these pictures. As you go on the story gets more informative, more background information is revealed: what beach actually is visited, where the depicted mill stood, character development and through that the relationship between the characters are also shared. The reader gets to know the names of the characters and towards the end, the point of view shifts between the protagonists.

HOW
I bought an old photo album on marktplaats.nl (a dutch craigslist.com, for selling second hand items). I started looking at the pictures and investigating them closer. With online research, consulting other people and prior knowledge, I found out the basics: the visited places in the pictures and the possible relationships between characters. Because of the multiple events I could read the pictures as a story. I took out the pictures and hung them in frames, themed together bases on my story. In the now empty album I took my own journey of discovery as an example (as opposed to giving the reader the full story right away) and in the beginning I placed only a little bit of text and in the end when the story climaxes there is a lot. I typed the narrative I constructed in about 26 meters of black dymo tape (punch letters in plastic tape).

WHY
Pictures in private photo albums function as placeholders for complex and rich memories that are activated when we see these pictures. Abandoned photo albums have something sad about them, because there is nobody left whose memory could be activated anymore by these pictures.

I wanted to let people think about memory and remembering, every time you look at a picture and remember the event, you are recreating it in your mind, this is highly connected to imagination. With the pictures taken out of my bought album and replaced by dymo tape, there is only a textual description visible and you start imagining the story on the fantastic visualizations you have created in your mind.

So by making up an entire story that could be called 'memory', I am re-activating the album by re-connecting it to a potential memory. It could be the story told by the pictures. The story could also be different - we simply don‘t know. The narrative that is unfolding in Man on a Beach, is posing hints at the fact that these photos do tell a story, even if it is different to the one told.

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Tumblrsaurus V2.0

WHAT
In its current state, the Tumblrsaurus works in a browser and has a mainpage where a user can insert his/her username and click submit. This triggers a script that runs trough all their posted photos, which I will call their 'collection'. The output is another page, where on the left a slideshow of your own collection is visible, and on the right 3 other users are visible, with their latest photo posts shown in a column (so, three columns are shown on the right). These three users have a collection that is an ultimate match to yours. At first glance, each individual picture does not have too much in common with the other pictures (colours, subjects, shapes might be of a totally different kind), but each Tumblr user has a specific taste in pictures, which makes their collection as a whole unique and cohesive. Tumblrsaurus is designed to find matching interests based on communication (as opposed to keyword search or image comparison), therefore it finds matching collections and images that somehow seem to have something to do with each other, even though one picture could be featuring a sparkling horse and the other a nuclear disaster.

HOW
Next to uploading their own items, Tumblr users usually reblog items they come across on Tumblr. A script indexes all your photo posts. Each posts has 'notes' attached to it. These notes consist of other users who have reblogged or liked the photo after you or before you. The script puts all these connections into a database and gives it value 1. When the same user appears again in the list of another picture, the value will raise. When the script is done, the user with the highest value is your closest match. The three closest matches are represented next to your own collection by their last 10 photo posts.

WHY
Through the Tumblrsaurus I wanted to compare image collections. Unlike music, which is already labeled, established, has a background story, etc, the origins of these images are for the most part completely unknown. It is so uncanny that these loose images on the web can be pinned down to something so ungraspable and indescribable. The photos in the collection all have something in common, but its mostly a feeling, they share the same elements, but I couldn't say that collection one all has black and white pictures or the other collection has a war theme. It's all a mix, and it's up to the person to decide what fits in their collection, and that's ultimately what shows in this project: the hand picked choices of people, which cannot be put into keywords, colours, shapes, or other regular image comparisons.

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Desert of Sine

WHAT
From a computer a user can upload any (webcam) image to the server and the computer will turn it into a 1 minute loud futuristic sound using sine waves. This plays through a speaker set. At the same moment a microphone connected to the same computer will record that sound again with background noises present, and transform it back into an image. This way the image will show the interference during the transformation, capturing time and space of the surroundings. The resulting images are black and white and grainy all over, with peaks here and there. They are uploaded to the internet and shown on another screen simultaneously.

HOW
When you upload the image, it's actually uploaded to Tumblr. A script running on the computer checks Tumblr continuously for new images. If so, it downloads it and performs a set of operations: it transforms the image into the bmp format, it runs a program on it that transforms it into sine waves (bmp format required) and at the same time starts a recording program. When both have finished it runs the transform program again, but applies the transformation in reverse (it processes the sound back into an image). When it is done building up this image from sound, it uploads it back to another Tumblr account. This is all behind the scenes. All we see is a window to upload a file, when we do this we hear a sound, and after a while, on another big screen we see the transformed image.

WHY
This project was done for the Rebelhuis event, which was based on the Speedshow concept (rent the computers in an internet cafe for one night, show your work). I wanted to capture the space and time of the night, sound in addition to image. With the growing popularity of the digital camera we have collected loads of snapshot photography that become ever more meaningless, and I wanted to add something more. The photographs people took become some sort of map because of the extra layer of data that is embedded. On one photo I can see Birgit singing and in the other Laura clapping, in neither they visually doing this. The reason I used Tumblr as my image storage is purely because of my own programming restrictions at the time and also I was diving into API's (how to communicate to e.g. a website) and how they work.