trees are people too

In my discussion with Adrian in the tute regarding my manifesto he directed me towards this great post by keshanee which points us towards a demonstration of photosynth on TED.

It’s pretty outstanding, and a lot of the ideas behind it are parallel to the ideas behind my manifesto – the idea that by collecting and collaborating all of this visual media, the end result would be a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. The collection of a vast variety of photographs (or in my case, videos) of all different quality, texture, meaning and context would result in an situation of emergence – the emergence of ‘exceptional’ productions and the occurrence of some sort of natural order within the collection that could then be analysed and learnt from.

Photosynth is less about actually learning from the visual experience than it is the experience itself – microsoft describes it as ‘the newest and most exciting way to view videos on a computer’. This is where my manifesto falls down a bit, as I am more excited about the ability for everyone to be involved, rather than how we are actually going to curate these maps and experiences. The bit I want to draw from photosynth is their concept of the relationship between photos, allowing you to sort and navigate. They propose tagging and identifying photos to relate them to one another, while my idea was just to collect and store, and allow an emergent method of sorting to tack place.

But I realise now, while this might be possible, it would be incredibly slow and time consuming and potentially messy (the mess is kinda exciting, but hey). There needs to be some method of ‘tagging’ the videos, identifying them, searching through them. Perhaps this could be encompassed in a small display screen that shows poster images and titles, similar to what is done here. Then the user could identify what area they wanted to view, research or ‘learn’ from.

Adrian mentioned I needed more constraints, and I am beginning to understand what he meant. I was letting it run a little too wild. While I still don’t want to restrain the duration, quality or content (I am working on the basis that storage space on the web is limitless) it needs a method of sorting. This will have to be done through some kind of ‘title’, a title screen or a text title. I’m working on it.