mattbell

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).

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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.

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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.