I found some of your life: someone found a memory card from a camera in a taxi, and is posting a photo a day, narrating as though he’s the photographer. Ethically really iffy (would you like it if it was your photos?) but such a cool idea!
Previous Post
wheel of misfortune Next Post
ubiquity? 7 thoughts on “found life”
Leave A Comment Cancel reply
Recommended Posts
Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – […]
Having your own words processed and restated can help you improve your thinking and your writing. That’s one reason why talking with someone about your ideas can help you clarify your thoughts. ChatGPT is certainly no replacement for a knowledgable friend or colleague, […]
Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, the new AI chatbot released by OpenAI, and I’ve been fascinated by how much it does well and how it still gets a lot wrong. ChatGPT is a foundation model, that […]
A few weeks ago Meta released Galactica, a language model that generates scientific papers based on a prompt you type in. They put it online and invited people to try it out, but had to remove it after just three days after […]
This spring when I was learning R, I came across a paper by Anders Kristian Munk, Asger Gehrt Olesen and Mathieu Jacomy about using machine learning in anthropology – not to classify big data, as machine learning is often used, but to […]
I’m co-organising a preconfernece workshop for AoIR2022 in Dublin today with Annette Markham and MaryElizabeth Luka today, and I’m going to show a few of the ways I’ve engaged with new digital platforms and genres over the years. This is a key […]
Scott
Interesting — one of the local radio stations here is reading one page of a “found Boardwalk diary” each day. Could be the latest wave in reality media.
Anne
It reminds me of a film or documentary someone once made. I can’t recall any details except it was about finding someone’s address book in the street and then phoning all the contacts listed therein to build up a picture of one person’s life.
Sindre
Sadly, it’s now shut down
Jill
Ah. That would be because it was Slashdotted and it didn’t really prove too hard to find the owner of the photos. Who presumably DIDN’T want them on the internet. Neither would I.
nick
Clearly the right way to do this project would have been to take the photos yourself, pretend you found them, post them one at a time with “made up” comments as if you found them, and wait for the firestorm of controversy over the ethical and legal dimensions of your artwork to erupt. And then, as they would say on Slashdot, profit!
Matt Locke
The address book project mentioned above is by the fantastic french artist Sophie Calle. Called ‘l’homme au carnet’ it appeared as a series of interviews published daily in the french newspaper ‘le monde’. She approached people listed in the address book she found in the street, then published the interviews, building up an intriguing composite picture of the man who owned the book (some people were surprised they were in there, as they hardly knew him. Others were ex-friends and lovers).
Eventually, the man recognised himself (or heard of the project from friends) and called on le monde to stop it and make reparations. In a typically french compromise, Calle offered to expose herself in the same way she had exposed him, by printing naked pictures taken of her during her brief time as a burlesque dancer, in the same newspaper. The man accepted the proposal, and the pictures formed the final element of the project.
The best resource for Calle’s work is ‘did you see me?’ a collection of her work, incuding l’homme au carnet’, or ‘double game’, a collaboration with paul auster. Paul Auster used ‘l’homme…’, and others by sophie calle, for the oeuvre of a fictional character called ‘maria’ in his book ‘leviathan’. He also invented a few new works, so Calle created a new project to perform these invented works, closing the circle between the oeuvre of Calle herself and her fictional ‘double’ Maria.
Jill
Thanks Matt! Reading a fuller description I realise I *have* heard of this, but I’d forgotten the details and the names. I wonder whether the creator of Ifoundyourlife considered offering nude pics of himself in return for the breach of privacy?