The camera itself has become a networked object and through the fusion of the snapshot-camera and the mobile phone, this object will even become more part of our everyday lives. Cameras always have been recorders for their contexts, essentially equipped with a light sensor to capture a visual representation and a pressure sensor for the person who decides which moment will be saved - the button.
A photo can be constructed in a variety of ways, but in almost every case it is proof that someone pushed a button at a chosen moment, isolating a blink in time. In this sense, there's not only a reference to time and a framed representation of a situation, but also a link to a person - the person outside the frame. Furthermore, digital photos come with a great amount of data attached to them as so-called EXIF-tags. These include a multitude of precise information about when the image was taken, technical aspects of the shot, the make of the camera and how it was held.
When uploaded to the web, these photographic objects form a vast collection of human experience, which at the same time can be searched for specific information.
In this project, we focus on the data about the time that a photo
was taken, since we consider the notion of the moment of great
importance. For almost any given moment since early 2004, it is
possible to find a photo on the web which was taken in the exact
same second. For every of my photos that I myself have a memory of
and an emotional connection to, I can see someone else's moment. I
can see what happened in another part of the world while I was doing
what I remember when I see it.
In that sense, cameras become networked buttons that create a link
between two people through the simple fact that they did the same
thing simultaneously: pressing a button. The cameras create a visual
trace of it, with time as a reference.
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