Digital Maps & Tracking

Related to last week where we explored surveillance, this week we looked at tracking and digital map technologies.
We started off by looking at Google Maps and instances where they'd messed up. It's interesting that Google Maps is so advanced yet has trouble understanding bridges...

Further interesting is how you can view remote places in the world that you would probably never otherwise get to see, such as the abandoned Hashima Island off the coast of Japan, which can be recognised from the latest James Bond film, Skyfall.
The island was used for coal mining, and was inhabited up until 1974 when the mine shut down, as was happening all over Japan.
It's crazy to be able to explore this distant and abandoned island almost as if you were actually there...

After looking at maps we moved onto tracking and the use of GPS technologies (which is, incidentally, what I'm currently writing my essay on.)
While presenting a great opportunity for advertising and marketing, these new locative technologies are seen as invasive for many.
For example, apparently police now able to use mobile phone tracking to track anyone...

However, some people are finding ways to rebel against this and to claim back a degree of privacy...

The iPhone tracker app is another way that people are taking back some control/agency over their use of these technologies.

After this week and all of the research I'm doing for my essay, I'm definitely starting to think more about issues of privacy and how our supposedly meaningless information is perhaps being used. I might now think twice before allowing random iPhone apps to access my location and information!

Surveillance Society

In the seminar this week we thought about surveillance and how we are constantly being watched, and therefore governed. This links to what I'm writing about in my essay, but I'm looking specifically at issues of surveillance and the invasion of privacy posed by GPS technology on mobile devices.
I'm using Foucault's theory of the Panopticon, as well as using a lot of David Lyon's ideas to do with surveillance society, which are really, really interesting.

I came upon this article on the internet and thought it was particularly notable...

Spy Cams in Planes Would Track Facial Expressions for Terrorism and ‘Air Rage’

In the workshop we also looked at facial recognition systems, and how people have been experimenting and finding ways to get around them.

This website, 'How to Hide from Machines' is definitely worth a look, there are a lot of interesting ideas on there.

Also interesting is the work by artist Adam Harvey, who is experimenting with the same sort of things.

The image below is one of his pieces of art, showing how make up can be used to confuse facial recognition systems...

His website can be found here.

I've particularly enjoyed this week as the subject is something I'm especially interested in and I think is very relevant today.
As Richard Thomas, the government's information commissioner said, we need to be careful we don't 'sleep-walk into a surveillance society'...

ReacTIVision

In today's workshop we looked at a programme called reacTIVision:-

Apparently what reacTIVision does is perform the 'tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects'.

So it understands things like this...

...But doesn't quite understand faces.

As you can see, it gets a bit confused but in the process creates quite a cool effect .

 I took some screenshots of me messing around on the program (with the lab in the background).

I like the effect you get with the black and white contrast for hair....

It's a pity you can't mess around a bit more with how the image looks, you can't change any controls to alter the it unfortunately.

Image Glitching

In the workshop today we've been looking at image glitching, which is something I'm pretty interested in. I'd never really heard the time glitching before in relation to images; from what I understand image glitching is basically messing around with, distorting, and corrupting an image (to get a cool effect).

Some great examples of image glitching are as so...

There's a really good HTML 5 tool to use for image glitching, and I've been messing around a bit with the image of Kate Moss that I'm using for my project.

So I've gone from this...

To this...

And this...

And then this...

Very fun to mess around with! I'm thinking that maybe I could find some way of incorporating image glitching into my project.