Thursday, April 26, 2012

the descriptive camera!

instead of bitching about how i can never seem to make it to any screening of christian marclay's "the clock", or migraine headaches (as originally intended), i thought i'd come through with something positive...
so smile, and say gorgonzola for the descriptive camera, from matt richardson. 
this is absolutely taser factory. with a capital T. instead of an image, this beautiful device produces a description of what ever it is that one is shooting! it cleverly explores a very interesting, and possibly burgeoning concept...like maybe a camera that automatically "tags" people, places, and things via whatever technology from whatever huge tech firm that nails it first and puts it our device-hungry hands for around $300. i don't think this exists yet. does it?


here's the rundown of it from the matt richardson website:

The Descriptive Camera 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 Cameraonly 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.
some of the descriptions are hilarious and beautiful. 


this is fun.

surely check out the official word from matt richardson here: