Replace New Year's Eve Fireworks with an App

There have been some calls for new year's eve fireworks to be cancelled in Australia, due to bush-fires. Perhaps they could be replaced, at least in part, by spectators' smart phones. The idea would be to have each person hold up their phone, which would display part of a coordinated pattern. This would be similar top the effect where those in a stadium hold up colored cards on cue, but could form a much faster changing, more vibrant pattern. This could supplement laser light shows and displays projected on buildings. This would also turn people from spectators, into active participants in the show, as well as avoiding setting off pyrotechnics during a total fire ban.

What is Real on The Internet?

Greetings from the Australian National University "Information & Human Centred Computing" where Dr Sabrina Caldwell is talking on "Digital Image Credibility".

To provide credible photographs Dr Caldwell suggests camera could record biometric information about the photographer, characteristics of the image sensor of the camera (to identify the camera), the processing of the image in the camera, and later. The image could be watermarked or have a digital signature to prevent tampering.

One technique which occurs to me is that the characteristics of the lens used could also be used to identify the camera used (this would work on old analogue cameras as well as digital ones).

What was not clear to me is why it would be considered to be worth preserving the false impression the public has that digital photos can be relied on. It would seem to me to be better to educate the public that digital photos are easily manipulated and should not be relied on for more than entertainment. It would be useful to have ways to authenticate photographs used for legal and scientific evidence.

Dr Caldwell suggests wrapping extra metadata up with an image, to show how it was constructed. This could be very useful.

There may be alternative ways to verify how "real" an image is. For example truth could be crowd-sourced: rather than depend on one photo, a large number of photos claiming to be of the same thing could be compared.

Multimedia Art Exhibition in Canberra

The "Forgetting: Works on The Web, Diverse works by diverse students" multimedia art exhibition is 6pm–8pm, 18 November 2011, in Rooms N101 & N115–N116 in the CS&IT Building at the Australian National University in Canberra.

• Image: Box and folded paper by Catherine K, photograph Tim Brook 1998

International Electronic Art in Canberra via Istanbul

Tracey Meziane Benson and David Broker talked about their visit to the Istanbul Biennale and ISEA Odyssey at Gorman House Art Centre, this evening.

The ISEA exhibition. and the Istanbul Biennial were held recently. Photos from the art exhibition at Cumhuriyet Art Gallery (Taksim Cumhuriyet Sanat Galerisi) were shown.

But the interesting gallery building upstaged the art. It must be very difficult to have any exhibition in Istanbul which is not upstaged by the cityscape (like trying to display a sculpture next to Sydney harbor). The building was originally a water reservoir (cistern) built in the 1700s.

Tracey's paper "Remotely Connected Remotely Creative: Leapfrogging Digital Divide" is available:

What does locative media from remote Australian Indigenous communities look like? How does access to 3G mobile phones impact communications? What media is being created on these devices?

This paper discusses some of the strategies being used in remote Australia to leapfrog the digital divide; scoping the potential to introduce tools that encourage creative development and collaborative cultural engagement focused on skill sharing.

For more İstanbul, see my "Istanbul by Public Transport".