Photosynth: Obama Inauguration - The Moment

Photosynth: Obama Inauguration - "The Moment" CNN.

Boulevard du Temple, taken by Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839

Uricchio in “The Algorithmic turn: photosynth, augmented reality and changing implications of the Image” (2011) notes the distortions seen in the imagery produced by the program and the photographs that could be rejected because they were taken at different times of the day. Then, Uricchio asks, “what about the "transient, the contingent‟ that Baudelaire ascribes to the modern” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29)? The most widely seen example that “addresses this problem” was CNN‟s "The Moment‟: “a synth of 628 user-submitted photographs of the moment that President Obama took his oath of office” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29). Uricchio suggests that „The Moment‟ “reveals a lot of temporal slippage- changes in bodily position, different configurations of the flags in the wind and so on. The constants, the point clouds, seem grounded in architectural detail and the configuration of the podium more than anything else” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29). Yet, the more “one examines close shots of the crowd, Uricchio argues, the more one is reminded of early-nineteenth-century, where long time exposure often resulted in ghost figures” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29). The photographic images: “these fugitive images emerged from the gaze locked within three-perspective and subject to early photochemical emulsions” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29).Within Photosynth, “there is a different mechanism is at play: tolerances of algorithmic reassembly; but the ephemeral, nevertheless, seem to pose a very real challenge to the system” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29). Uricchio points to the work of Canaletto‟s Piazza San Marco with its Basilica 1730 as an example of an image where the “subject-object relationship is fixed” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.30). In Photosynth‟s “dynamic assemblage” “the relationship is unstable” and “subject to the whims of the user and the capacities of the algorithm” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.30). What project 3 iis concerned with is Photosynth‟s “radical disjunctures” and the “unstable nature of the composite” and as in cubism, many points of view are called upon (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.30).

Sources:

"The Moment" final version - Photosynth:  http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=05dc1585-dc53-4f2c-bfb1-4da8d5915256

Uricchio, W., (2011) “The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image” Visual Studies vol 26 Issue 1pp. 25- 35