SituationistPhoto

While working the dust of groups for my Avant Gardening web page, it became clear that the success and failure of these groups is their group picture collection. There's always someone not in the group yet or someone no longer in the group that begs for truer life in their flat picture book -their two-dimensional history and existence. We do not have a picture - and, that medium is as flat as it gets. They failed but we do not have to follow in their footsteps. What game can we play that takes the place of formalizing ourselves and what same game would lure in the restless rest of the citizenry to drop what they're doing for a bit more fun and authenticity? We send in a picture that represents us without re-presentation except in and over time. A collage is made up of participants self-figuration contributions. Over time that figure can be changed but only by the person it represents. That's direct democracy in action. That's media without mediation. Be in y/our group picture. That's the revolution in a nutshell. Being in the picture is what makes you become a member: a chainless letter effect and affect. A moving animated picture over time. It's two-dimensionality becomes alive because it grows and changes. It needs a Wikipediac graphic application. It is spectacularity in motion. It roams the flashy streets at night, wanders the shadowed clubs, clubs the wandering shadows. Its realness is automated. Ah, laziness finds pay off in technology. Never needs winding... like the Stay-Puff marshmallow man meets the cellular self-perpetuation of the creature trapped in John Carpenter's The Thing. The restless can rest while the revolution does the work for the working class lining up - not at the gates of the banks or the banks of the lemming sea - but at the snapshot booth. Wasting time to become a member - all that speculation could ever carrotize - here, now, free. The pants are down on the lamest game in town. The game of no games is in town. AntiGame must automate revolution - we already gave at the office.

Mind you that the snapshot takes place every time a picture is added or moved or changed. Perhaps it will have to be done at the end of each day for spatial constrictions. The snapshots are played back as animated group. Pictures change positions. Members change depictions. Some become less visible due to clutter or slack expression. The power plays are endless. The positions are meaningless over time. The membership is addictive. This is the advertised revolution at its finest and at its worst - in paradoxical space over time. Limited by disk space and visual resolution, the membership shall find limitation to the game frustrating and want more than it can provide. Wanting it all is just the game this one leaves in sight but out of reach. It is the only conclusion. The AntiGame begs for all that lure of the commodified social - and trims the fat and glitter from the gaze. It bares its withered promise while overextending its promise. The balance fails and the gaze is broken. Game over? Game just beginning....

The mechanism for inserting new and rotating previously spiraling picture/pictographs of members has them coming in from two four-armed spirals twisting in opposite directions. Two arms are for submergent descent and two are for emergent aascent to visible boundaries of the collage. One spiral's submergent entry point injects from midpoints of the bottom-then-left-then-top-then-right sides and the other inserts in from the NE-NW-SW-SE corners. Each spiral has four appendages as previously stated - with two going in to the center and with two emerging to a face or corner. The pics have a rule regarding overlap: money paid, loudest voice, correctedness, command. Just fooling. They are based on evoked laughter, memories of lovemaking, hottest theoretical contribution, best drugs contributed. Just kidding. The algorithm is random - as in a coin toss. I like the idea of text injections as well in case there is no theory or there are flaws which allow the emergent spiral arms to let go of pics as they get to the edge - hurling them into real life. Also in question is what happens if collisions and inertial force at the center to punch ahole through to the unknown. Of course that is just for what we all secretly hope.

If someone wants to write a small algorithm and list/database that rotates and tracks each pic and places it within the spirals according to the few rules, great. The game also requires a replay mechanism - streaming a list or database of snapshots taken over time to animate the group's collage. It occurs to me that a soccer team photo with spinning and popup-float down heads that rotate submitted photos would do quite nicely as well....

Anyone sending me a pic should send it in JPEG/JPICT/JPG format that is reduced and scaled down to 1.3x1.3 (or smaller) and less than 50 KB.

The following will become buttons that allow you to act on this (via the injector, the snapshotter, the rotator, and the animator technologies) - to activate unstoppable confrontation of members on the same body that knows no limits - and hopefully the this-less world that awaits in its smug still-life.

Rather than a world trapped in photographs that seal out time....

add your pictograph

A Situationist Group Photo