User:Mirjam Dissel/writing assignment

Man on a Beach, Posing

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.

Tumblrsaurus V2.0

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.

Desert of Sine

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.