User:Mirjam Dissel/2nd thematic project

-DESCRIPTION.
One of Mirjam's older projects 'Katalog' is about selling stuff on marktplaats, people are using pets as a way to make their stuff look more desirable.

She started researching dog ads: images on dog fanatics site looks exactly the same as the images on Marktplaats for instance. It's interesting to see how people advertise themselves/pets/objects for different purposes. What is the feeling of the picture?

(marktplaats, fanatic page, selenium script to post scraped dogs)

For Seda and Michelle's workshop she investigated Leo Roubos, a radiomaker. He's proud of his wife, takes a lot of pictures. One could make out a lot about his life from those pictures.

At that point Laura joined in, we subscribed to datingwebsites in order to see how people advertised themselves. Lot of sunglasses, shirtless people. People with dogs again or people having a beer. Also interesting to see the interior of their houses, one guy had the same cabinets as Mirjam, which was kind of weird, to see them in a different environment.

Subscribed to a fetish website. Because of the nature of these pictures, the subjects are much more confronting. Since there is a certain air of mystery involved in this subject, it is interesting to see what we can make out of these pictures. The background tells us a lot. Information on what brand of cigarettes, laundry, neighbours. The insight in the living room is really much more interesting than what's happening in the foreground, BECAUSE of what's happening in the foreground.

NSFW!!!

 | |
\\//

At this point Mirjam was confused on how to continue the fascination for the background and what it means to advertise/show off something for a particular purpose through the means of photography.

-THE STORY OF HOW IT ALL GOT TOGETHER BECAUSE TUMBLRSAURUS WASN'T FINISHED:
Laura's tumblrsaurus had a challenging purpose: a new way of browsing tumblr images, finding new people to follow, based on shared interests. it didn't really work because of the method used to look for "similar keywords", but also because the whole concept of starting from a word was faulty in the first place. What Tumblrsaurus really is about is browsing by concepts, in a way "semantically", but more specifically via mind association. the problem with keywords is that the contents of this (potential) association are all but tagged by the users, so if we look for dogs, all we are gonna find are pictures that in the foreground have a dog doing something (not what I'm looking for)

-SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEMS
Tumblr doesn't support various ways of searching for images. When searching for a keyword, it's often hard to find the particular type of images you are looking for. You can look for a fuckyeah... group (often fuckyeahs are made in honour of a particular subject) But when browsing for new stuff on the top of your head, you run out of keywords. The system relies on reblogging and via via discovering of images. you have to subscribe to people/communities in order to discover interesting pictures, only then you can find out what the roots of the pictures you like are, and subscribe to the (photo)streams of the original authors if you like. Another reason why it's hard to find images using keywords has to do with the way the taggingsystem works. Not everything is tagged according to what is actually visible in the picture.

(different collections, Saskia, Fuckyeahcrayonhair, Laura and Mirjam)

This is also what Laura's project is about, it is about associations, about connections. When we look for let's say particular kind of homey alaskan looking hotelroom pictures, there is no way of describing it so that tumblr understands what we mean. But there is a certain feel to these photo's we're talking about, and they're very abundant on the website.

When you google for Starbucks, you will get logo's and photo's of the outside of the stores. When you do the same on Tumblr you will get artsy pictures about coffee cups, waking up in the morning, jokes even. Tumblr is about popculture, it's about what's hip. Google has too much shit going on, it's not fenced, and too mainstream, this is why we are using Tumblr.

http://www.tumblr.com
http://www.geertmul.nl/Geert_Mul/MatchMaker.html

If we can create something that allows the user to search through a picture instead of a keyword, it would be able to capture the feeling of the image, just as it is shown in Geert Mul's work. Images are connected through similarity, this also included similarity found in background, texture, color, perspective. So, the program will match the uploaded picture with an already existing images. We're thinking about abandoning the keyword in total. If you click the image if would repeat the process with the new image. You would be able to upload existing files or use the webcam. We want to make an android application, so no more hours of sitting behind the laptop, clicking (that's what Tumblr users do), but fresh air, and a new way of exploring, reblogging and expanding your collection and dashboard. If you click one of the new pictures the process would repeat itself. An option to also upload your photo to your Tumblr and a reblog button would be embedded.