Depressing Starbucks

I just got back from a trip to the city centre, I wanted to do some shopping, however I got the fear after about an hour of browsing and decided to abandon the mission and come home. It was quite good though, for the first time in ages I actually had my MP3 player with me, as well as headphones. Normally I don’t have the latter; a constant frustration. Meandering around, listening to good music, catching the occasional smile from a stranger. I really enjoyed it actually.

Just as I passed one of the many Starbucks in Manchester I was reminded of an idea I had when me and my sister were on a demonstration supporting Karen Reissmann.

During the demo we must have passed about 5 branches of Starbucks. Each one was populated with a row of people in the window seats. Their faces were long. Like horses. Their eyes full of sorrow. They weren’t brought to life by the caffein hit they were indulging gifting themselves. It was really extraordinary. It didn’t matter how man Starbucks branches we passed, these window dwellers mood never seemed to improve. For some reason those with a blue mood seem to congretate around in the stools by the windows. Those in the interior were not as woefully depressed-looking. I want to do a series of photographs based on this. A good excuse to use my zoom lens.

The Stile Appreciation Society

After becoming aware of some inspirational societies (Clouds, Pylons), and having an excellent brainstorm with Jody in the Music Box, I’ve decided to found the Stile Appreciation Society.

Over the Christmas period I’m going to seek out some of the stiles hiding around Keighley and maybe I’ll go up into the Dales to find some real beauties.

Photobombing

Photobombing was a great idea when I first had it, in the summer of 2007. I knew that it was good, and I really liked it, so I dived in head first. At that point I said that Photobombing was the utterly pointless act of attaching photographs to public places for random strangers to find. And I did it, I put hundreds of photos all over the place for people to find, each one was tagged with a label on the back uniquely identifying that image and asking whoever finds it to visit Photobombing.com and leave their comment and a new image that incorporates the old one. It worked pretty well, however I’d set up a very inefficient system. All the photos were stored on Flickr and the website was a Blogger blog – which allowed for very limited customisation.

Since then I’ve tried several times to rekindle my interest for Photobombing, but I’ve always run into some technical issue with the website that’s put me off. I think I need to return to my ‘gung-ho’ attitude that I had in the first place.

One key change that I’ve identified is to distribute the photos among people that I actually know, rather that relying on a random person from the off. Relying on people picking up the images from the street at random although romantic, in reality, means that the ratio of images to images with responses is really small.

I had aimed to re-launch Photobombing over the summer, but found myself bogged down with trying to finish the recording for my album (to meet a deadline for Creaked Records), so Photobombing has been delayed again. However I’ve reformulated quite what I want to achieve with it. Now I’m going to operate it just like a pyramid scheme; I will send a number of photographs to people that I know. With each one I will ask them to take a new photograph incorporating the original. This new image will go onto the website, and will be geotagged to show how it has travelled. Then I want the person to send the original photograph onto someone else and repeat the process. Eventually I should end up with a site that tracks the progress of these photographs in an ever expanding network, with photographic evidence the whole way a long. Why? Why not?

Prayer 2.0 is going brilliantly, I’ve ‘advertised’ the site on the web, and combined with the existing user base the site has become quite vibrant; with some extremely varied content. I’m mulling over the next stage, what to do with all of the messages; a book maybe?

Otherwise, I’ve “launched” (or more realistically, ‘tested’) The 100 Portraits; a concept where I distribute 100 photographic portraits of a person, each with a question on the back, to complete strangers and ideally at random. The aim is that the strangers will answer the questions, based on the image that they see. I tested it with the first year Interactive Arts students, by asking their tutor to hand them out. So far I’m only approaching 30 portraits that have answers, but take a look here.

Also I’m 99% done with the recording of my album, so fingers X’d we’re on for a 2009 release. Thanks Leo :o)

Also its my birthday next week. So happy 25th me!

• Geocaching for Second Life (or a Geocaching-like game)
• Photobombing for Second Life
• Travel-bug games for Second Life (passing a “token” around many people) – this is my favourite. It’d be cool to track the bugs path through SL but also track where the people involved are in real life.

Today’s procrastinative displacement activity is giving some much needed attention to this blog.

Photobombing has attracted some comments from various people on the internet and is still smouldering away by itself, which is really encouraging. I really want to get it properly sorted, so its a more cohesive system and accessible to anyone (which unfortunately it is not at the moment). I think that is going to involve quite a lot of re-learning how to program – but should be fun in its own right.

I was particularly pleased yesterday when I stumbled across Imran Ali’s blog and his post about photobombing. Its so good to see/hear/know that people other than myself are attracted to the concept. Imran summated photobombing with this, it isn’t quite correct (I don’t think) but this is probably how photobombing should operate:

I guess it’s basically the inverse of geotagging, rather than tagging a digital map with digital photos, you tag a physical place with real photos :)

A (cool) twist of fate is that he discovered the concept of photobombing via geotagging which is something I’ve been extremely interested with lately.

Speaking of geotagging, I’ve finally got my mobile phone/bluetooth GPS and camera combination to work smoothly, so in future I can ensure all my photographs will be geotagging automatically. But I’ve also discovered the phenomenon of geocaching. What am amazing thing this is. A network of “cachers” maintain thousands of caches throughout the globe. A cache can be any sort of container, and will contain a log book and official geocaching.com paperwork. Sometimes there are gifts inside, or puzzles, riddles, clues to find another geocache – anything! Anyhow, all the cache’s and their GPS co-ordinates are available on the website and anyone who so wishes can go in search of them. Its great fun, I recommend it to all.

I am certainly going to combine my photobombing escapades with geocaching.

Sometimes I wish time went twice as slow, or me twice as fast.

I already have a page for my photobombing project to include geo-tagged photographs – using the website loc.alize.us.

Anyway, I’ve had some success, its taken a few days but I’ve finally managed to create a Google Earth file containing correctly geo-tagged photographs from a trip I took yesterday. Fantastic! See here…..

If you’re interested in doing this yourself, I suggest reading this page; http://hikesandbikes.blogspot.com/2006/10/life-of-geolocated-blog-post.html – its a very thorough walk through of how to set all this up.

Also, many thanks to Ed, of blogEd.co.uk and Tommi Laukkanen. Ed wrote a blog entry about Carling beer taps, which I landed on very randomly. Then I read his article about GPS tagging photos, using a Java enabled phone and Tommi Laukkanen’s “Trail Explorer” application – a very useful program that logs your geo location as you go and exports to a .GPX file.

Also this is fun opportunity to send another trackback :o)