I’ve started a tumblr blog http://memorytraces.tumblr.com, similar to the one I have here http://www.carladrago.com/memorytraces but with a simpler layout (and simpler back end process). I’m experimenting with a this simpler style in order to see if it’s more conducive to content production and curation. My aim is to curate series of images, and create small stories for each one. I can also insert relevant quotes or links and so on. I’m trying to create some sort of coherent order from all the photographs I have.
I also came across this piece of iPad development http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/ipad-iphone-tactile-object-recognition-system-bodes-well-for-board-games-20100827/. You may have seen it. It hasn’t been released yet, so there’s no way of understanding from a technical viewpoint how it works, but I think it’s a potentially in terms of creating an app that requires physical objects to work. In my case it would be a physical, specially IDed photograph, that is touched on the screen, and which brings up content related to that photograph. It bridges the physical experience/virtual experience divide that’s been troubling me about creating a solely digital piece – especially when so much pleasure from photographs is, to my mind, lost from not having/holding/touching a physical photograph. Turkle tells a wonderful story in The Secret History of Devices about a drawer full of photographs her mother kept, photos which were annotated on the back with notes and funny stories, and which were looked at every so often, drawn from randomly. This is what we miss out on when we look at photos online and it’s what I’m trying to instill into my project with the use of a physical box of photos. But I’ll have to see how the tech is implemented and whether it’s viable. I’ve made contact with a former UK developer colleague, based in Berlin, who is keen to help me out on the development side of things.
Tags: ipad, rfid, september 2010, tactile object recognition, touch