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Whose Finger on the Trigger?

This photo shows the futsal pitch next to Shibuya crossing - its nice enough but it's far from unique. Probably 10s of thousands of photos have been taken looking at the same view all shot within 1 meter of where this was taken. How are your memories of experiences shaped by other people's recordings of pretty much the same thing?

If you've ever gazed down onto that pitch you've probably either spent time in the spot where this photo was taken or one floor directly above. The hotel top floor has the best elevated view but is on route to a restaurant with a constant stream of people coming and going, and pretty bad reflectivity. The floor where this photos was taken is not open to the public but once the photographer is past the admittedly lax hotel security it offers an unhurried view, time and space to document.

How does what you decide to capture change when you have real time access to the 1,000+ geotagged photos (a small selection of Future Perfect geo-tagged photos here) taken from the same space? With sufficient processing power its possible to extrapolate views of how somewhere, something or someone will look like in the future - in essense creating a mock-up of what photos will be taken after you were there. How does it change your sense of what is original? The value you put on what was created? Or the details in the creation process? And seen from the opposite side - how does the subject of what is being documented change in response to access to photos of itself?

How long before we have sufficient creative commons content to auto-generate static movies? A Year in the Life of the Eiffel Tower is now streaming from server near you.

Writing from Tokyo | September 5, 2006 | Permalink