The London Design Festival has commissioned Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram to design this year’s Trafalgar Square installation. The installation titled OUTRACE consists of an immense mechanical octopus assembled from six industrial robotic arms on loan from Audi’s production line. Custom software developed by the designers will allow members of the public to temporarily take over the installation and render text input as light traces drawn by the synchronized mechanical tentacles. The resulting light paintings will be recorded using specialized high definition video equipment and published online.
Ok I get it now. You upload your photos then share them around with people with similar interests to you. It’s not just a portfolio site, it’s all about connecting and exchanging.
Why isn’t Flickr used by more people? It’s fantastic! Here are my reasons why:
Very easy to find images you were looking for
A good group function that gives creators a high level of control
Open-to-all ‘pools’ of images to bundle related photos together
A great search tool that sorts results by ‘interestingness’
Well-adopted API which links and syncs with other sites (not Facebook of course)
A large community of helpful and insightful photographers/commenters
Uploading is a dream and meta-data from photos are autoprocessed (ie. it knows images were shot with an N95)
Digital rights management to give users true ownership
Geotagging support linked with Yahoo! Maps
Highly secure login through Yahoo! authorisation (ok – tenuous but important)
A great visual identity, history and brand currency etc etc…
The point is, I’m sold. Gush over.
One other thing though is that once photos are up there, you can share them in all sorts of ways. My favourite is through the slideshow, which lets you grab an embed code to place elsewhere – how cool is that?
Here’s an example, taken from the lifesforsharing group pool being used by photographers who were in Trafalgar Square last night, best watched fullscreen:
Cool right? I’m going to be taking my camera out more often, so expect a spot of photo-blogging very soon. Now then, where’s my memory stick…
T-Mobile attracted a huge 18,000 visitors to the event last night in Trafalgar Square, who were informed of the happening through an integrated twitter, viral seeding, PR and Mobile campaign. Subscribers and visitors to the lifesforsharing YouTube channel were also informed, as were members of existing Facebook fan groups.
Here are my best images taken from the front. There is no denying that this was a highly polished media affair, but it was carried off with enough honesty to create what I think was a truly positive feeling. Even Vernon Kaye was brilliant, and I usually hate him.
