Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Land of a Thousand Words

 

Everyone knows the old adage "A picture is worth a thousand words," right?  Erroneously ascribed to Confucius, the saying has nonetheless become synonymous with the ability of a photograph to capture our collective imagination.

Brooklyn-based "creative technologist" Matt Richardson has taken this notion to it's logical next step and created the Descriptive Camera, a device which works thusly:

Point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

Descriptive-Camera-600px  results-600px

 

The device is still very much in its infancy and the descriptions aren't exactly the most picturesque, but I could imagine with the right person behind the keyboard they could be quite poetic.  If anything it'd certainly make for an interesting show at the John Cleary Gallery!

 

Artist: Scissor Sisters / Album: Ta-Dah

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