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I thought I'd allocate a lot of my copious free time this year to doing a huge burningman art project.  Instead I ended up traveling for a long time.  I'm back, it's now July, and there isn't much time.  A friend told me today that I have one more day to submit an art project for placement in the open playa.

There's an idea I've been kicking around for a bit.  It could work as part of a well-attended theme camp or as open playa art. 

If you're interested in helping me on the project or if you think it would work well as part of your theme camp, please let me know.  I haven't chosen a place to camp yet.

Here's the idea:

CONVERGENT EVOLUTION:

I have noticed during my travels around the world that there are certain similarities that show up across widely varying cultures.  I have a huge number of pictures documenting this, and they often make interesting side-by-side comparisons -- eg beachgoers in England vs beachgoers in Vietnam, a temple in Vietnam vs a church in London, kids playing in India vs kids playing in Amsterdam etc.  They are signs of how ideas have spread across our world yet evolved to suit the local environment.  Since I have a large number of photos that I plan on tagging, I could fairly easily write a program that picks potentially good compare-and-contrast photo pairs based on the tags, and presents them to a user.  The user can vote yes or no based on whether the photo pairing is interesting.  As more and more photos are voted on by users, the pairings will get better and better.  (I will be using the user input as the "natural selection" fitness function in an algorithm that will basically evolve better pairings)*

The user experience will consist of sitting in front of a big projected screen and pressing buttons to vote on the image pairs as they show up.  People could run through the pairs as fast or as slow as they want, and known (or evolved) good pairings would be mixed in to keep people entertained.

*My backup plan is that if the awesome algorithm doesn't produce interesting results, I'll turn it into a photographic version of "hot or not" where people repeatedly vote on the best photo of a random pair, and the photos that show up will start getting better and better.

The overall contraption would likely consist of a 8x8x8ft cube made by stretching fabric over a pipe skeleton.  Since projectors suck power, I'd need to have (or have access to) a generator.   It could work well as part of the inside of a theme camp's dome (provided the theme jives with this project).

----

Anyway, if this could be of interest to your camp or is something you might want to help with (even if it's just contributing photos), please let me know your thoughts.


----

What/When/Where proposal:

Convergent Evolution discovers the underlying similarities between cultures across the world and how ideas have spread yet evolved to suit the local environment.  Pairs of photos from different parts of the world are projected onto a screen, and interesting connections are found and evolved based on natural selection as provided by viewer feedback. 


Date: 2009-07-01 02:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] serolynne.livejournal.com
Sounds very compatible with the Camp Nomadia theme if you wanted to discuss placing it there. We have quite the camp coming together this year - about 35 of us right now. And, unlike last year - the majority of them are actual nomads and travelers.

We'll be doing Nomadic Happy Hours and even potentially hosting a couple of moderated discussions on topics specific to nomadism. Having a photo project like this sounds like it could fit right in.

Date: 2009-07-01 06:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com
Cool. One question though -- I know you prefer to be in a quieter part of the playa, and this project will have better data if lots of people use it all night. Do you think there will be enough traffic/visitors?

Also, is posting to what/when/where still open? That could help with the # of visitors.

Date: 2009-07-02 01:21 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] serolynne.livejournal.com
We've requested the same general location as last year.. so you know that data point. Only you can determine what is enough traffic for your goals.

I would have to run anything by the rest of Camp Nomadia to see if most are open to changing the scope of the camp. But I would imagine that anything inviting constant heavy traffic might not be something we're open to. But who knows, we could play around with putting the display on the road and outside of the 'neighborhood' of the camp so that folks aren't constantly walking into the living space.

I just checked WWW - doesn't look like they're yet taking listings as they're doing a redesign on the process. So no rush there.

Date: 2009-07-01 05:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] xleste.livejournal.com
I LOVE this idea! I won't be at BM, but just wnated to say that I'd love to see your pics in general! Have noticed the same thing in my travels and looks at history and am fascinated by human development.

Date: 2009-07-01 06:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com
If I do a burningman version, I ought to be able to do a web-based version too... it will be a good opportunity to learn web programming.

Date: 2009-07-01 09:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com
Oh, and you probably have lots of good photos you could contribute to the pool too.

Date: 2009-07-01 08:55 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] patrissimo.livejournal.com
I love the idea of pairing travel photos, but to me, the extra complexity of the display at Burning Man allowing live voting would outweigh the extra coolness. As a viewer, I'd be pretty happy just to see a lot of pairs (or larger sets) of travel photos showing cultural differences & similarities, even if I couldn't vote. And it would be way easier to just make it a website, take votes for a month to evolve your function, then make big prints of the top-ranked pairs to display at the event.

Date: 2009-07-01 09:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com
Thanks for the feedback. The suggestion sounds like a good fallback plan if the infrastructure gets overwhelming.

I do already have a lot of the physical infrastructure required to do this from a BM project a couple of years ago. I'm talking to theme camps to find out if I can just use an existing projector setup, which would let me focus almost entirely on the software.

I plan on programming the software as a web application so that I can put it online as well as at Burningman.

Date: 2009-07-02 03:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] radven.livejournal.com
Very cool idea. I like it. :-)

And I'm sure I could come up with some tagged photos to feed in as well.

Though allowing it to feed off of community commons photos in Flickr would give you an immense dataset to work with... Have you considered this? It would allow much broader global coverage than the combined travels of you and your friends ever could.

Date: 2009-07-02 04:52 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com
I'm considering that, though my photos will be very richly tagged so it will be easier to create good potential matches for people to vote on.

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