being there, 2007
This series was conceived with the aim of manipulating certain parameters implicit in the notion of photography. Comprised of a 35mm camera controlled by a portable, wirelessly networked PC and attached to a webcam trained through the viewfinder, the BEING THERE system is capable of three modes of operation:
I. MOTION: The system, running surveillance software which interfaces with the webcam, fires the camera when motion is detected within a user-defined region. Optionally multiple regions may defined, and the level of motion required to trigger the camera can be altered. In this case, the system was set to high sensitivity with a motion region encompassing the entire view of the camera, but was set to fire only if at least five minutes had elapsed since the last shot, in which case the camera would have a 50% chance of firing for each motion event detected.
II. PSUEDO-RANDOM: The system can also be set to fire the camera in a 'random' pattern which according to certain user-defined parameters. Here the camera had a 1% chance of firing every five seconds.
III. REMOTE: The third mode allows the user to look through the viewfinder and fire the camera remotely over the network. Pictures may be taken as often or as seldom as one wishes, although network latency will cause a slight delay between what the user perceives and what is actually in front of the camera at any given moment.
BEING THERE's initial run was conducted over a period of three days, with a different mode being utilized on each subsequent day, and with one roll of 36 exposures being shot per day.
Originally, BEING THERE was intended as a way of removing the photographer from the scene being photographed. Photography, unlike other forms of art, always assumes the physical presence of the artist in the scene being depicted, and by association their interaction with it. This is true even when the photographer takes great pains to distance himself from the scene, either by photographing discreetly or through the use of equipment and/or staging. In this series, the photographer is not present at all, and in modes I and II has no conscious control over the shutter at all, although it may be argued that the presence of the camera is more important psychologically than that of the photographer.
Another goal was to test photography's reliance on the happy accident and its relation to intent (whether my own or that of the computer). Here I am unable to dispell any of my own notions about the role of pure luck, as although the pseudo-random roll produced only two or three frames I would consider 'usable', one of them is probably the most interesting to me of the entire series, and two or three good frames is perhaps a greater number than I generally get from a roll of film shot in the usual manner.
