Introducing projectography
Oct. 22nd, 2009 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWhen I used to write for tech and design mags, I'd often cover gadgets. Apart from the iPhone (which made me weep tears of joy over my Wired column) it was hard to muster much enthusiasm about any of them. My tech-lust -- strong in the 90s -- seemed to be saluting digital cameras, mobile phones, and vacuum-cleaning robots at half cock. That's why I rarely review them here on Click Opera.
[Error: unknown template video]
The Nikon Coolpix S1000pj is the first digital camera in years to elicit any sort of excitement at all from me. Above you see stunt group Helicopter Boyz demonstrating some less orthodox applications for the device, which is basically a digital camera with a projector built in.
The video got me considering other ways you could use the S1000pj. You could project a photo of your own face on top of video projections at art shows. You could project the word LIAR onto Tony Blair's white shirt while he's making a speech on live TV. Flashers could take flash photos of their own genitals and project them onto the bedroom walls of sleeping maidens. Pictures of laser beams could be projected into the cockpits of landing aircraft, leading them to imagine themselves blinded and crash. But please don't do that while I'm landing in Japan this December, because I'll die before I can buy one of these remarkable cameras.
Is it even, technically, a camera? Nikon have coined the slightly pretentious term "projectography" for their European press ads, suggesting the camera heralds a new hybrid, multimedia artform. It's not just that you take pictures that you can see immediately (that's been possible since the invention of the Polaroid), it's that you can turn your snaps (and movies) into spectral ghost-presences in the same environment you shot them in, a possibility which invokes R. Murray Schaffer's idea of "schizophonia".
[Error: unknown template video]
In the UK and US ads, annoyingly entitled kids project pictures of a band onto the band's own t-shirts, fall asleep with their S1000pjs clutched tightly in their hands, then project pictures of the rising sun onto their pillows. Plato would've been spinning in his cave.
The S1000pj was supposed to be released in August, but -- due, Nikon say, to unprecedented pre-order demand -- has been pushed back to October 23rd. In Japan it'll cost 51800 yen, which works out at €381.96 at current exchange rates. Not bad for such a paradigm-shifting wee device. The only downside is reportedly short battery life.
In an age of samey-same camera design, I for one welcome this eccentric amphibian, the camera-plus-projector. Let us become projectographers. Let us embrace a gadget which proposes the first new artform of the 21st century. And let us devise uses for it undreamt of by the manufacturer, and not yet outlawed by bylaws. Projecting poetry onto our own faces as we sit on subway trains! Projecting blood onto Christ's loincloth in church! Casting a third eye onto the bank manager's forehead!
[Error: unknown template video]
The Nikon Coolpix S1000pj is the first digital camera in years to elicit any sort of excitement at all from me. Above you see stunt group Helicopter Boyz demonstrating some less orthodox applications for the device, which is basically a digital camera with a projector built in.
The video got me considering other ways you could use the S1000pj. You could project a photo of your own face on top of video projections at art shows. You could project the word LIAR onto Tony Blair's white shirt while he's making a speech on live TV. Flashers could take flash photos of their own genitals and project them onto the bedroom walls of sleeping maidens. Pictures of laser beams could be projected into the cockpits of landing aircraft, leading them to imagine themselves blinded and crash. But please don't do that while I'm landing in Japan this December, because I'll die before I can buy one of these remarkable cameras.
Is it even, technically, a camera? Nikon have coined the slightly pretentious term "projectography" for their European press ads, suggesting the camera heralds a new hybrid, multimedia artform. It's not just that you take pictures that you can see immediately (that's been possible since the invention of the Polaroid), it's that you can turn your snaps (and movies) into spectral ghost-presences in the same environment you shot them in, a possibility which invokes R. Murray Schaffer's idea of "schizophonia".
[Error: unknown template video]
In the UK and US ads, annoyingly entitled kids project pictures of a band onto the band's own t-shirts, fall asleep with their S1000pjs clutched tightly in their hands, then project pictures of the rising sun onto their pillows. Plato would've been spinning in his cave.
The S1000pj was supposed to be released in August, but -- due, Nikon say, to unprecedented pre-order demand -- has been pushed back to October 23rd. In Japan it'll cost 51800 yen, which works out at €381.96 at current exchange rates. Not bad for such a paradigm-shifting wee device. The only downside is reportedly short battery life.
In an age of samey-same camera design, I for one welcome this eccentric amphibian, the camera-plus-projector. Let us become projectographers. Let us embrace a gadget which proposes the first new artform of the 21st century. And let us devise uses for it undreamt of by the manufacturer, and not yet outlawed by bylaws. Projecting poetry onto our own faces as we sit on subway trains! Projecting blood onto Christ's loincloth in church! Casting a third eye onto the bank manager's forehead!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 08:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 09:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 09:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 09:40 am (UTC)I'm amazed at the helicopter boys performance - not that the choreography was good or anything, but the range of the projected image, was.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 12:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 12:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 01:49 pm (UTC)sadly it'll probably end up being used like this - to stop people 'communing in pleasancy' !
go to 3:45
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFzCEfNoTCM
project me from what I want
Date: 2009-10-22 08:27 pm (UTC)Re: project me from what I want
Date: 2009-10-22 09:25 pm (UTC)Hope embedding works...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 10:13 pm (UTC)David Lynch's "Inland Empire" was done on a DV cam that cost only a fraction of the Red's price.
Plato would've been spinning in his cave.
Date: 2009-10-23 02:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-23 05:28 am (UTC)Goodiepal, on a rooftop in Philly this evening.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-23 06:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-23 04:29 pm (UTC)A friend of mine asked Kristian to do a performance on her rooftop, and a handful of us were invited. It was pure magic: this eccentric fellow in a waxed moustache and worn out French brogues scuttling across the skyline of the city, weaving a web of theory-as-poetry. A bit of a shaman, this gent: was enthused by the small bag of acorn caps that I gave him, each oak species having a different sound (turns out he collects this sort of thing). Generous, too: gave me a couple books and records of his. An absolute treat to see him lay out his ideas.
Goodiepal plays Starr Space in Brooklyn tonight.
too late e e e e eeee
Date: 2009-10-24 04:08 am (UTC)will there be more in nyc? I"d love to catch one...
Re: too late e e e e eeee
Date: 2009-10-26 05:34 pm (UTC)try emailing him on this facebook thing...
http://www.brainwashed.com/vvm/micro/parl/2009_fbook.html
---------------------------
The Future
The V/Vm - Goodiepal website will be on hold for now, "why?" you ask, well things change and I think that Jim is tired of updating this page here so let’s give it a break. We might very well tear the whole website down soon, but until then this will serve as a archive.
Hmm, so where to reach me in the future? Well why don’t you try facebook.
We are currently mainly active at facebook and have created a group called
RADICAL COMPUTER MUSIC AND MEDIA ART since that is what we think we are doing.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=32383722932
This is a FREE forum, and you might ask me how can it be FREE since it’s facebook?
Well because I will give the control of the forum over to you, I will be using it frequently and you can use it as well, here is the log on info:
http://www.facebook.com/
Password: vesterk
Email: brobeckhelen@gmail.com
THIS WILL ALSO be the only online way to contact me!
Think about it, if you have to contact me you have to log into my profile and then send a message to myself, then next time I log in I can reply, but so can other people, and you will never really know if it’s me or somebody pretending to be me!
THIS WILL OPEN UP FOR ENDLESS ACTIVITIES LIKE THIS ONE:
http://www.discogs.com/release/13032
But actually there is a much more sinister idea behind this. If you ever believe in fairytales, Angels, UFO sightings, conspiracies etc. You have to leave room for the “MAYBE” in your daily life!
I really think that the maybe is disappearing in our modern forms of interaction, and we need to bring this back! - Please use the profile as much as possible, but please don’t change the password. If you do so the fun will be all over.
This is a game about trust and after completing this text about 900 people will be in possession of this knowledge. This leaves the possibility open that each time you speak to me you might be speaking to one of the 899 Goodiepal imposters around, and you will have to use your brain to know if it is the real one.
At the same time you can email any of my friends and pretend you are me, and by doing that , we know what can happen.
At the end of the day I have made almost all the money I have needed to support myself on the dark side of the internet!
YOU CAN FOLLOW me in here!
-----
Ohh Goodiepal..........
Irisya
Re: too late e e e e eeee
Date: 2009-11-01 02:26 am (UTC)