Symposium : Futurecast : Lifeline Timeline

I presented this at the symposium. Here is the introduction...
Imagine yourself in a future where your image is captured at every step you take throughout your day. There will be cameras in the dashboard of your vehicle, throughout your home, and strategically positioned on the streets. These cameras are in addition to the currently existing ones in our grocery stores, banks, and gas stations. The images captured by surveillance cameras, personal cameras, and medical cameras will be the main contributor to plotting your life, generating a lifeline timeline. Each of us will have a timeline that is maintained automatically and accessed in cyberspace. This timeline serves as a means of documenting your actions, similar to the recordings captured in a black box of an airplane.
Poster Lifeline Timeline Presentation (without my notes)

Project 4 : Round 2

For the symposium some of us are presenting our Future-casting projects (Project 4). I am going to revisit mine with the future of surveillance images in mind. Here are a few (scary) articles speculating the future of surveillance.
Little Brother's Watching You
Spy planes, clothes scanners and secret cameras: Britain's surveillance future
Big Brother is watching us all
Looking out for data surveillance predictions for 2020

Project 4 : Feedback

Notes from final crit on 11/8:
gr: on top, is comparison used to show? could you compare people … two streams at once?
kc: could you look at other methods other than comparison?
sh: could the images be from your perspective and not the image of you taken from outside? could you position a viewpoint in proximity to subjects in the photos
kmmk: search parameters change the size of the "rings"?
dg: what can the rings show as a visual other than volume? what other information can a ring do/say/mean?
mwkf: date only method of search? or purpose of demonstration?
ah: the visualization is about specific times, dates, etc. the verbal presentation was through
dg: right now w/the subject being all you, does it inspire narcissism? navel gazing?
dg: iphoto remembers/organizes by dates, which doesn't work for her b/c its all numerical. what are other ways of looking?
gr: data must be organized by something concrete
kc: consider removing date as MOST important data, shift priority
ml: the two DO intersect
rr: what about surveilance photos, like at atm? pics taken of you that are not from personal perspective
dg: as time goes on there will be different kinds of photos in future … paper, digital still, video to where?... love the idea of introducing images that are from "surveillance", not taken

Project 4 : The Final

Let me welcome you to my future (as it relates to participatory culture). It's circa 2020, we are all networked via the scannable chips that are inserted under our skin. This chip allows us to be continuously connected to others, to cyberspace, and to ourselves. At this same time in the future, photography has taken a new spin. Any image that is taken of you or around you becomes a part of you, creating a timeline in cyberspace of your life that will exist forever, long after you have passed. How do we see and interact with our timelines, with other's timelines? What is past the typical contact sheet and preview of photos? The participatory culture will have grown into one that expects instant gratification with minimal steps, however, their desire for interactive experiences will increase. Cyberspace, as we now know it, will have taken on new meaning by this point in the future. The space will be vast and the way we will move through it will take on new behaviors. Welcome to my visualization of the future....

Project 4 : The Visualization

After much thought and reading, I chose a somewhat unclear path to begin visualizing...the future space of social networks on the internet.
I began to think about the future internet as a space that is not contained by a screen and window, but a space we move through. This starts to visualize how one would find their contacts and friends, in the future everyone will be linked, profiled, and identified in cyberspace. I started to sketch the visuals before finding the images of galaxies. I have found that it isn't a new approach to think of the future internet as representing a galaxy...I must have seen or read about it at some point and visually went there.

CRITIQUE:
-Point of view is singular and "god-like"
-people are represented by dots, look at other ways
-look at other networks and what is currently happening
-the future of the internet may already move this direction
-like the organic quality
-narrow the focus

Project 4 : The Future of Participatory Culture

ASSIGNMENT:
Speculate (wildly) the future of participatory culture,
as it relates to DESIGN.
What will be made?
What cultural factors will influence the evolution of design?
What kind of aesthetic values will emerge?
The final work IS TO BE THE THING: a designed artifact which would exist in the future you have imagined, not an explanation of that future.

SUGGESTED READINGS:
Social networks: after privacy, beyond friendship
Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins
Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling