1 post from September 2008

Photography, Art and Metadata

Digital photography has lots of associated meta-data, this is information that can easily be added too.

This presentation will look at two projects 'I want to photograph everybody' and 'iCurate' both are based around the ease of electronic photographic production and use both the associated metadata as well as extra data such as FOAF, or Cloud Tagging.

Both projects are designed to be viewed over the web as well as being able to enter the real world through exhibition spaces and prints. They both work with the concept of digital images and associated meta-data.

iCurate allowing the user to build a 'show' based around the results of searches against the tags people add to their photographs on the flickr service.

'I want to photograph everybody' uses photography, and FOAF to build up a network of people that I photograph and meet. The most obvious links will be to the people who attend the conferences and workshops that I also attend as a part of my work, but the network is open to expansion beyond this and a part of the results will be the people who start to appear within the network beyond the original expected circles. In this I will be looking for input from those who are photographed to intorduce new people into the network. When I eventually 'meet' them and take their photograph they officially become a part of the network, thus there is a part of the process that takes place outside the online world back in the real world.

'iCurate' is a web based tool that will allow anyone to generate the results at any time whilst 'I want ...' is an open ended and ongoing project with shows and displays that will snapshot the progress of the network.

The result will be a view as to the possibility that the meta-data or the interaction and the connections made by possible such data could possible be considered art. From a technical point of view.

---

▼ ❑ Data Collection

▼ ❑ Car

▼ ❑ Data

• ❑ Date Mileometer Petrol (Date, cost, location of Petrol Station, Company)

▼ ❑ Car computer

• ❑ Mini-ITX

▼ ❑ Research

• ❑ Connecting to car computer to extract engine data

• ❑ See Gavin's idea on car data website

• ❑ Grants work

▼ ❑ Other transport

• ❑ Bike

• ❑ Alternative transport ideas

▼ ❑ House

▼ ❑ Readings

• ❑ Gas Meter Reading: Date/Time Meter reading

• ❑ Water Meter: Date/Time Meter reading

• ❑ Electricity Meter: Date/Time Meter reading

▼ ❑ Sensors

• ❑ Wattson - DIYKyoto - do some more research / maybe buy one

• ❑ Wind sensor - measure the wind speed over time around the house, to be able to evaluate the possibility of using wind power

• ❑ Temperature sensors - around house

▼ ❑ Stuff

▼ ❑ Data on stuff

• ❑ Barcodes

• ❑ Free range eggs have a code on it that says what farm it came from, can we get that data for example

• ❑ Japan - using barcodes to get data on products

• ❑ Art project - scan barcodes to get corporate data on companies

▶ ❑ Talk Idea

---

I decided that this was something I wanted to do shortly after helping with the first Big Brother Awards. I spoke to some friends and toyed with some data models but being easily distracted never fully pushed the idea through. Still it was on the web and I still got the occasional email, mostly calling me evil and CCTV is evil and ...

But the project has not gone away and the need for it just grows and grows.

iSee/Applied Autonomy have worked in NYC on mapping the cameras around Manhatten, the idea was floated again on the first MySociety.org call for ideas, Urban Eye, a research project being carried out by Clive Norris and ***** is building local data of areas for academic study.

Meanwhile the use of CCTV proliferates. The number of cameras in the UK alone is huge and this is just set to increase, especially due to the current climate of fear that pervades many countries.

The UK is CCTV101, a test lab for the use of video surveillance within a democratic society.

So how do we map this. The answer has to be, after years of toying and trying things out, boldly.

When we first conceived this project, CCTV was highly unregulated. Police would not even be aware where many cameras were situated. Now we are sure that the Police are doing more to make sure that they know where cameras are, this information is still not made available to the public.

So to start with, the first approach is to go out outside and look for the cameras. Look where they are situated, how are they mounted, where they are pointing. Understand how they appear in the urban infrastructure.

The sheer scale of such an undertaking on a national or international scale can be daunting and has in fact made us pause on a number of occasions, as we make up data and system models to handle the size of the data, but realise that we do not have the resources to actually build the data centre required.

To approach this you have to take a collaborative approach and not just for the collecting of the data but also for the storage and availability.

Simon Davies, Director of Privacy International, had at one point suggested that as a project we map the areas not under video surveillance. Whilst this would be more feasible in defining an approachable dataset, what you would have would be a rapidly decreasing dataset.

Whilst this may make for a striking image and may still be a useful project to undertake (instead of gauging pricavy and freedom in terms of number of cameras, how about using percentage of country not under surveillance). It is not what I wanted to undertake.

which brings us to the issue of recording a camera. How do we record information on a piece of street furniture like a surveillance camera?

Do we consider, say, a poll with 2 or 3 cameras on it a single entity or isi t correct to record each camera?

In fact what are we trying to record, the cameras or the spaces under visual surveillance? (bringing us back around to the idea of mapping those spaces not under visual surveillance).

What we want to do is define a schema, something simple that will allow people to hold files, say, for their street or maybe their route to work. Then much like FOAF, we could spider these files to build up a map of cameras. This way the maintenance of the data is up to an individual but the amount of data that they would have to maintain would be of a size that they feel is acceptable to them.

This model also sits well with another, early intention of the CCTv database, as originally conceived. This being that all we are doing is collecting, storing and serving data on cameras and their location.

What people do with this information is up to them. We came up with a few brief examples.

* Police interface - allowing the Police to monitor this information. We expect that they already have their own initiative and process here and I am sure there are a myriad of reasons why they would not want to use such a datasource (not necessarily justifiable reasons, but reasons all the same). This idea was floated to demonstrate the the project was politically agnostic about the cameras. They are there and need to be counted, whether you are police or activist, when it comes to using the data was not, for us, as the database creators, important.

* CCTV Density for UpMyStreet

* Activist route planner. Similar to the iSee project, what would be the route of least surveillance?

 

 

---

• ❑ Create an open source presentation stack

• ❑ Create a plan for an City based Centre for Alternative Technology (UrbanCAT)

▶ ❑ Visualisation tools

▼ ❑ Energy Boutiques

▶ ❑ They find you the greenest power

• ❑ They micro manage your energy use and purchase

• ❑ flag up warnings about high energy use / carbon emissions

• ❑

▼ ❑ Visual Billing

▼ ❑ mobile phone

▼ ❑ show calls graphically

• ❑ to who

• ❑ duration

• ❑ (where you were)

• ❑ Can download recordings of all calls.

Just some ideas, the state of my head at various times. Veers, towards surveillance a lot. Lets see if I can actualise any of the current batch :).