#descriptive camera

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Matt Richardson

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Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson, 2012

'Descriptive Camera' produces printed text describing the captured image.

After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still "developing" in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a Polaroid print.

-Matt Richardson-

Project website

[rominating]

Reading and Writing in the Digital Age

A lecture given at the "Book Live" Symposium that took place in London, 2013. The Book live! is a collaboration between the Centre for Media and Cultural Research (CMCR) at LSBU and bookRoom Research Cluster at UCA Farnham.

Ewa Partum Active Poetry (1971)

In our age of connectability and interconnectivenss, streams of images are intertwined with an overflow of textual data; The ever-changing contexts and multiple platforms construct world of readable images and legible texts.[1] Words, codes, or metadata, which can be read by humans or machines, have all become potentially interconnected. Moreover, the constant framing and reframing of images and words brought to the creation of endless narratives a certain destabilization of meanings as every movement or manipulation of images or texts is registered into an infinite archive. The role of images online and in digital publishing has become a key aspect in the contemporary experience of reading; the hyper-connectivity of the digital age accelerated the convergence between words and images. Images are woven into a textual setting being always surrounded by additional information, links and exhortations. As a result new ways of interacting with images and texts have developed. The speed and immediacy that defines the interaction with images and texts today, the facility with which they are produced, distributed and circulated conjure up new sets of relations between the images and text.

The Present and Future of Reading "The Book Live Conference" London South Bank University, June 2012 from Romi Mikulinsky

[onedaynever-blog]

Descriptive Camera Demo in NY this week!!!

You may already be familiar with this, it's so awesome. Matt Richardson's creation will be demoed at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens in just a few days. Get yourself there if you can.

"As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they're doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don't yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera uses crowd sourcing to explore these possibilities."

[a-small-lab]

[softpyramid]

Matt Richardson The Descriptive Camera One of my favorite photographic projects I have seen recently- Matt's camera does not produce a photograph (by any traditional means). Instead it crowdsources the digital image file to Amazon Mechanical Turk service (where you pay to have tasks done by another person anywhere in the world) until someone offers their services (for cash) to describe the photograph. In return, Matt's camera receives a human text description of the photograph that was shot, seen printing in the photograph above. With an average developing time of 3-6 minutes and costs $1.25, I don't feel so bad about using slow old-fashioned film anymore. Read more about it here.

[sarahemilyduff]

'The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.'

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