Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

The website for realfakewatches is finally up and running!

The watches are laser-cut props, made from genuine leather. Each displays a unique time and has a Thinglink on the back. While this is Linda Kostowski’s project, I have created the website, helped making them and also designed a watch, Aaron (the white one).

The website has a few nifty features such as an automated aggregator which will collect all the blogs’ comments, links to realfakewatches and so on. Check it out and tell us what you think.

Thanks to everyone who helped and enabled us to create a batch of prototypes – now let’s see where this goes.

Bit of a short notice, but Los Angeles-based singersongwriter Duncan McKnight is playing tonight in Berlin at Lauschangriff and it came to be that Trajets edit will be the visuals.

Drop by if you’re around, it’s at Rigaer Strasse 103 (map), show probably starts around 11h.

More video – Musée de l’Elysée have put a video of our panel discussion about photography, amateurs, Second Life and the taste of robot curators (see My Flickr schizophrenia) online.

Starts off in French, becomes English soon after. Featuring Radu Stern, Derek Powazek, Régine Debatty, me and Matthias Bruggmann.

At the panel about the new photography at the Musée de l’Elysee last Saturday in Lausanne, two questions came up which I found really interesting and worth sharing:

Firstly, is there a profound difference between photography before and after Flickr, in terms of how the moment is treated? Traditionally, the idea of finding (or crafting) the perfect and decisive moment has been the idea behind taking a photograph. There are limited exposures and subjects are fleeting, so better use them well. Nowadays, many of the old-school people argue, photography as such has become an indifferent process in which an almost infinite number of photos can be taken and stored and every artistic decision is gone. Is that really true? I actually don’t think that the classic kind of photography is dead as you can see so many people on the net work aesthetically with their cameras. There is, however, a second kind of photography which appeared with photosharing and which follows its very own paradigm. This photography is the kind which is much closer to what Flickr actually introduced, which is that cameras become just as much tools of communication as they are tools of photography. Here. the moment is a slice in time and the metaphor related to the moment is more one of a stream of consciousness out of which we take impressions than isolated aesthetic products. Very sensibly, Flickr call this the photostream. It’s for that differentiation I feel that I need to maintain my different Flickr personalities, plugimi is more about the crafted moments whereas saschapohflepp is the stream of impressions that i want to share with the world.

The other interesting question was, whether a screenshot from Second Life would qualify as a photo. Another one of those SL-paradoxons. But, I’d rather argue for yes I think. It’s difficult to make a point for that, but as a virtual simulation where individuals have real encounters and interact with the world, a representation of it should count as a photo. Maybe it only comes full circle this way since digital photography is half virtual already if you argue from the standpoint of representation through data. Many people are feeding their photostreams already with shots from their second lives (often alternating with photos from their first life), which for Flickr increasingly poses the same question. So far, their answer is no, by the way.

On a totally different note: Has anyone ever researched about how *much* music actually is becoming part of our working reality only due to the fact that we work and listen on the same machine?

I put the model of last year’s project Bright Russian on my desk today. It works, I can really see the sky from here now – I just wish it was a full-scale window. Maybe it will keep me from hibernating a bit as winter is setting in.

I was a bit submerged recently and the reason is that I have been developing a software in MAX/Jitter for use with live-video at Klangwerkstatt 2006 which is happening tonight. Four performances of electro-acoustic music and images from three cameras, skillfully handled by Angela Mewes, Lisa Rave and Linda Kostowski . At Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin Kreuzberg, starting at 20h.

The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in Australia shows Firewall as part of Hijacked, curated by Mark McPherson.

October 6th through November 5th 2006, opening October 5th at 7pm.

Our Mirrr-tshirts are featured on the cover of this month’s Page magazine. It’s an issue about the “democratization of photography and its visual consequences”. Yay!