Hackable Curator
Posted: 7 March 2007 Filed under: Ramblings | Tags: exhibition, hack 1 CommentI went to the latest Apollo tonight which was a guided tour of an exhibition on at the Plymouth Arts Centre called Slow. I’ve been meaning to pop along to it but never seemed to find the time so this was perfect. Rachel and Hannah of Low Profile have got a couple of showreels running. The Efford Moves project that Steve and I worked on is also on show but the piece that I really wanted to see was The Hackable Curator built by some of our masters students. Essentially it pulls images from Flickr with the tags “Plymouth” or “Slow” and displays 9 of them. There’s a robotic arm which then randomly drops onto one of the images as a selection process. Or at least that’s the impression you get, Martha explained how it actually works to us but my lips are sealed. The exhibition runs until 19th March so there’s enough time to pop along and see it.
A robotic curator is able to select images from Flickr using a preselected set of tags. The images from this resource pool are presented on a screen 9 at a time; from these, the robot, via a software algorithm, is able to make a selection of one or more of them that fit its curatorial criteria. Once selected the robot prints label stickers for each of the tags associated with the chosen images. This system represents the curator.
Anyone is able to add images into the resource pool by uploading them to Flickr and ensuring certain tags are added to the image. You may also vote on any images displayed on the website, by sending an SMS to the system. These votes are then fed back into the system and inform the future choices of the ‘curator’. These 2 mechanisms represent the notion of hacking the curatorial system.