Maker Faire Hudson Valley 2023
Interactive Automated Digital Photo Collage
Home: New York, United States
Interactive algorithmic time lapse generation of viewers seen through wireframe drawings of people and mirrors and windows. 3d pen, Raspberry Pi, Arducam 4-camera hat, 4 64MP cameras, python code, display.
http://www.tommymintz.com
Maker
Tommy Mintz
Artist and Associate Professor of Photography, CUNY Kingsborough Tommy Mintz’s work draws upon the aesthetics and concepts of street photography, collage and mapping in digital culture. Most recently, he has been working on the Automated Digital Photo Collage (ADPC), an interactive installation that captures sequential images, analyzes them for differences, and collages them. The project was built using the Raspberry Pi, a $35 computer and Python code. His most well-known project, The New York City Public Toilet Map, 2008, drew on his experiences as a street photographer and the universal need for publicly accessible restrooms. He researched, designed, and printed and distributed over 600 paper copies of the pocket-sized New York City Public Toilet Map, which was unveiled at the Jewish Museum, as part of the performance piece Uncle Bob’s Variety Show.
http://tommymintz.comWhat Inspired You to Make This?
I’m interested in our evolving tension with the digital world - particularly digital photography and its effect on our understanding of ourselves. How do our individual memory and collective understanding change through spending increasing amounts of time interacting with digital images? By using algorithmic photography in both the landscape and street traditions, I hope to raise questions of our understanding, perception, and memory of contemporary spaces. One photograph describes a place in a moment of time. Combining multiple photographs into a single image can convey the passage of time in a place. Many notable artists meticulously stitch photographs together into a seamless illusion of an extended moment. I am interested in the seams that arise when combining images algorithmically instead of by hand. The decisions the algorithms come to are different and strange things are included in the image that a human would not decide to include. Where the incongruities arise, there are interesting new forms created, natural to the digital image. As a born and raised New Yorker, these days of increased construction and the radical change in the urban landscape has made me ever more aware of the fleeting moments of place. I am fasciated with the similar incongruities of the physical world, and in this process express that fascination. My practice is based in Street photography, from Gary Winogrand, Helen Levitt, and Andre Kertesz as well as the collage process of photography, Murbridge, Marey, Reijlander, Hannah Hoch, Jerry Uelsmann, Wang Quingsong, and Stephen Wilkes are some of my favorite artists.
