Rich Trenholm
Rich Trenholm writes about digital cameras, except when he's writing about films, music and comics. He does not drink tea and never has.
Monday 30 June 2008, 5:39pm
Image Fulgurator: Guerilla art, simulacra and flashing at Checkpoint Charlie
The Image Fulgurator, developed by Berlin art student Julius von Bismarck, has sent ripples across the blogosphere. It's a device that projects patterns when triggered by a camera flash, so that von Bismarck's chosen image appears in the hapless snapper's picture. Critics fear invisible adverts, but Kameraflage does a similar thing in a much more monetisable form and that hasn't brought down civilisation as we know it yet.
The Fulgurator is more of a guerilla device, for arterrorist 'interventions' flashing subversive messages across "sacred or popular locations, or those having a political connotation". It's a form of real world détournement, adding radical new meaning to an existing text -- and all with the tantalising frisson of a possible pißartisten at work.
Very few tourist attractions could get away with defacing their visitors' photographs, because these days photos are memories -- what von Bismarck calls the "fabric of media memory". I know I frequently have to force myself to stop looking through viewfinders or LCD screens and just... look.
It's interesting that von Bismarck chose Checkpoint Charlie as an early intervention. It's a place loaded with political and cultural significance, but as many of the tourists pausing to crack a smile might be to be surprised to discover, it's not 'real'. The wooden shed is a copy, just like Shakespeare's Globe or Liverpool's Cavern Club.
In a world of simulacra, nothing's real, and not in the pseudo-intellectual Matrix Revolutions way. Photos from these places are representations of something that is itself a copy. Even when we do open our eyes and look for ourselves, what we see is still a physiologically mediated copy, our brain deciphering impulses that record a moment already lost; our memories merely fast-degrading electrical shadows of what we think we saw.
Oh, except for CNET.co.uk. We always keep it real.
Comments on this post
On one hand you have the tourists snapping everything without really seeing anything, and on the other: affordable SLRs and the Flickr crowd putting photography in the hands of so many proletariats, that it seems pointless to take a photo anymore. It's all been done before. Do we really need another photo of a sunset or a girl charmingly lit by the natural light from an open window?The artform has become radically degraded by its massive popularity. Now that anyone can take 300 digital photos and is almost guaranteed that at least one will be a "great photo" where has the skill gone? Perhaps the last refuge of the truly original photographer is to use this Image Fulgurator to wreck the cradle from within.
Posted by Terrance Tibblewaite on Thu 3 July, 2008 12:57 PM
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Interesting point. Maybe this kind of technology could be used to create kind of photographic 'mash-ups' and give tourists unique photos again.
Posted by Rich Trenholm on Fri 11 July, 2008 2:58 PM
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Ive seen the so-called Fulgurator when it won its prize at ARS Electronica. Its total crap. The most interesting thing it reveals is the how little people understand technology. Even as Julius Von Bismarck was attempting to demonstrate it live, he had to ask members in the audience not to use their cameras as it wouldnt work. His well-practiced girlfriend managed to eventually capture an image which had been modified. Another intersting point is that the 'fulgurated' image of Obama which is being touted to support his 'Guerilla' tactics never turned up anywhere in the press.. could it be that no-one elses images were manipulated? I fail to understand why this is groundbreaking since it is basically a projector...and one that doesnt work very well either.
Posted by KarmicWarrior on Thu 18 September, 2008 12:06 PM
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