Singularity
visual culture

At the Inaugural Youth Ball, the new President of the United States of (North) America and the First Lady Obama salute the crowd.

What an amazing image!
While the event is happening, we the audience indulge in its consumption by recording it, rather than experiencing the event itself. We engage the media, the channel, the interface, and not the message. This image speaks volumes about how we experience reality, about our relation with the image world, and about ownership. I saw it recently on Coscientious (through TomorrowMuseum, Venture Beat, Ekstasis, Constant Siege). Although we have seem similar images or may have even experience this ourselves, specially during concerts, perhaps because of the event, Obama’s new presidency celebrations, it may have reached global values.

It is obvious that such mass-recorded events could not have taken place last century, without the advent of new technologies that could facilitate both the mass production and the mass distribution of the photographic apparatus. But it was bound to happen, as more and more people become owners of digital cameras.

There is a double intrinsic idea in the photographic act: not only you think it is worth recording, but it is also worth owning. The image Im taking is precious both because I was there and it was important, and because I desire to be the owner of that document.

A while ago I read about Kevin Kelly’s essay Better Than Owning, that arrived to me in a much shorter version in Boing Boing feed, that I read about again in Share Economy, and I think it is worth repeating here:

“Very likely, in the near future, I won’t “own” any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won’t buy – as in make a decision to own — any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won’t own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to “own” it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership.

For many people this type of instant universal access is better than owning. No responsibility of care, backing up, sorting, cataloging, cleaning, or storage. As they gain in public accessibility, books, music and movies are headed to become social goods even though they might not be paid by taxes. It’s not hard to imagine most other intangible goods becoming social goods as well. Games, education, and health info are also headed in that direction.“

It is hard to chew a way forward in terms of a Photographic share economy, though while it seems excessive for mankind to record the same event with millions of cameras, we all want to have one, to take one. Maybe the issue is there, in the sharing. Or perhaps we have to relax and enjoy what we are experiencing rather than recording it (remember how we became slaves of our video-cameras in the 80′s?), is it then a matter of education? a cultural construct?

In our endeavor of mapping the world, there has been a good number of inventions and developments that would keep us amazed for the rest of our lives.

The history of panoramic photography is quite an interesting one, and has referents from the very beginning of Photography. From the first 1843 hand-cranked camera, with fixed-lens, and a 150° field of view, to the full rotation of the Panoscan, there is an enormous list of devices, apparatus, machines, and general concoctions that were developed in the race for a perfect experience of a panorama.

Nowadays, some of the most interesting panoramas I have seen are made with the Gigapan, and through the  360-degree panoramic images. Both systems are quite different, and are experienced differently too. The 360 panorama places segments of images taken within an imaginary three-dimensional sphere, so we are able to look anywhere within it. The Gigapan system is just a stitching of a number of high-res images on a flat surface, without three-dimensional distortion. It is done with such accuracy that you are able to zoom in to a very close distance, often discovering interesting features in the panoramas. Both systems yield very interesting results.  

Have a look at these 360 panoramas.

The Gigapan:

Have you ever wonder what it should be like to have eagle eyes? 

Gigapan images are created using a robotic camera mounted on a tripod and software developed by Carnegie Mellon University and NASA Ames Research Center. The Gigapan system can be combined with web mapping services to give detailed views of geographic features. It enables even inexpensive digital cameras to take hundreds of overlapping digital images that are then programmatically stitched together into a single panoramic image. Because each image can be composed of billions of pixels, the resolution is astounding. Gigapan images can be panned and features zoomed to amazing detail not available on ordinary digital images. And all for under eur400.
If you already enjoyed the pleasures of traveling with Google Earth, try now to enable the Gigapan layer.

Some cool imagery includes:

Sliabh Liag, Donegal, Ireland.

Dublin Castle, Dublin, Ireland.

Machu Picchu, Peru.

Lugano, Switzerland.

And of course:
 
President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address

via Gigapan

It was the 5th of November 2008

It was a great night and one that change how news are experienced. I had on my Mac ABC news live, UStream, Twitter-election US, and Twitterrific. On my telly, I was swapping channels from CNN, RTE, Sky News, to FOX. But it was an amazing experience just being able to heard the voices of loads of people through Twitter, that had previously reported live the results from their own neighborhoods, cities and states. I think Twitter changed for ever how we experience ‘the event’, on real time and hyper-commented. 

Check this sites tonight

UPDATED:

Is Obama President?
Is Obama President Yet?

So now I wonder, how will I experience the Inauguration Speech? on Twitter and Current

Follow the Inauguration Speech, and make it yours

Head to Current and learn more: “Current & Twitter have teamed up again. We’re adding your real-time Twitter messages (“tweets”) over our live broadcast of Barack Obama’s Inauguration.”

We are all living in a giant cosmic hologram. I told you. And it is not digital, it is analog. I recommend you to read this article if you have a minute or two. Otherwise, see if this excerpts motivate you to do so. 

Our world may be a giant hologram

“Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface”

“If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.”

“Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry.”

“If you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring,”

“Confirming the holographic principle would be a big help to researchers trying to unite quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity. Today the most popular approach to quantum gravity is string theory, which researchers hope could describe happenings in the universe at the most fundamental level. But it is not the only show in town. “Holographic space-time is used in certain approaches to quantising gravity that have a strong connection to string theory,” says Cramer. “Consequently, some quantum gravity theories might be falsified and others reinforced.”

“Hogan agrees that if the holographic principle is confirmed, it rules out all approaches to quantum gravity that do not incorporate the holographic principle. Conversely, it would be a boost for those that do – including some derived from string theory and something called matrix theory. “Ultimately, we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory.” As serendipitous discoveries go, it’s hard to get more ground-breaking than that.”

via NewScientist

A peek at the upcoming design documentary “Objectified”, by Gary Hustwit, the director of “Helvetica”. The trailer features the voices of Jonathan Ive, Andrew Blauvelt, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid. The song is “I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool” by El Ten Eleven. 

Objectified premieres at film festivals and events worldwide starting this March, more info here:http://www.objectifiedfilm.com

About the film

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Read director Gary Hustwit’s post about the film.

By Magnum Photographers, produced by Magnum in Motion

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