Resembuild

Remaking an image one photo at a time.

A single image is chosen, and broken up into fragments. These fragmented images in turn printed onto cards. Participants take a card and, in exchange, are asked to recreate the image they see on the card, taking it with their camera phone, and either MMSing to an email address or uploading it on the mobile web. The submissions can be viewed online, where you can compare the original and its recreation.

Mobile Midterm: “Mo’Body”

For the MM midterm, Yaminie & I knocked around a few ideas (including a “moblog” that would build on an existing ‘activist’ service that would allow women in India to report on incidents of sexual harassment and an online directory of street art that would allow uploads from phones), but finally settled on something that we felt could be entirely realized in the extremely short development time. We came up with a project that ideally works as an interactive public display of some sort, that can be altered by uploading images. So, “Mo’Body“: a website that displays composite image made up of three (body) parts, all of which are individually alterable (read: replaceable) by MMSing or uploading an image from your mobile phone.

So, to get technical, this is how it works: the user takes a photo of their head, body (torso) or legs, and sends an MMS containing the photo with the appropriate subject (‘head’, ‘body’ or ‘legs’) to “callmitchquick@gmail.com”. There’s a PHP script called “parseMailScript” on my ITP webspace that extracts the image, and sends it to a folder on my directory. Another part of the script resizes the image to a chosen, standard resolution, resaves it, and puts the link in a MySQL database. The actual project is a Flash movie (a .swf file) that, upon loading, runs another PHP script that queries the database for the URL of the resized image and returns the result as a variable in Flash. The Flash movie takes that variable and loads the image into an empty ‘movie clip’. Phew.

Phone 2 Blog

For week 4 of ‘Mobile Media’, we adapted the ‘ParseMail’ and ‘Upload’ scripts to allow uploading to a blog (at http://itpmobile.wordpress.com) via MMS and via an online location (accessible by net-enabled phone). The post displays the ’subject’ of the MMS as the post heading, with the embedded image below it.

MMS “Reverse Image-Labeller”

For this mini-project, I worked with Mobile Media classmates Yaminie and Thomas to develop what Yaminie-termed the “Reverse Image-Labeller” (the inversion of Google’s Image Labeler) – instead of requesting people to tag existing photos, they would be supplied with a keyword, and take mobile phone pictures that fit that description (so, to use a non-negative definition, i guess it’s a kind of image-hunt game). The results, so far, are a rather bare-bones site, accessible here. Possible future additions: comments, voting.

I’ll Send an SMS to the World

And that’s the last time I’ll ever allude to the Police on the blog. Some SMS projects I like:

Canal Accessible is an online photographic directory of the places around Barcelona that make like difficult for the physically disabled. The obstacle or impediment is photographed with a cellphone camera, and uploaded to the website. It’s an interesting way of imaging the city from a unique perspective, and an good example of how the immediacy of the mobile camera lets us document places and moments that would’ve likely been ignored in the pre-mobile era.

Both TXTual Healing and Urballoon use projection technology to writ large the usually small and personal Short Message. “TXTual” does this by placing SMS conversations into ’speech bubbles’, usually projected onto screens and buildings. It turns the usually inward, introverted activity of SMSing into an engagement with public space, and an acknowledgment of a larger public conversation. Similarly, “Urballoon” (a big, tethered ball that floats around 3 stories high) projects SMS messages onto the ground, from a great height. These projects have the effect of making a small action into something epic, and opening up the language of ‘txt’ into something potentially broader, perhaps more political (both project websites emphatically emphasize their commitment to free, uncensored speech).

Finally, a little self promotion – midway through 2007 I initiated a project called Tree ID, which encouraged fellow South Africans to find the cellphone towers in their area that had been disguised as trees (this is a common activity – I have since been assured that there are over a thousand) (though I got a grand total of five submissions), photograph them with their mobile cameras and send them to a number. They would then be forwarded to an online database, and ultimately place them on a Google Maps mashup, based on their location (gathered through a triangulation of cellular towers). With this, I wanted to ask people (in a fairly humourous way) to examine the intersections between society, technology, and the ‘natural’ environment, thinking of the cellphone tower as one of the few visible (though often obscured) markers of a largely invisible process of electronic information exchange.