AKELIAN PRODUCTIONS

I guess I’m not surprised that someone thought of this [Image Fulgurator], just that no one thought of it sooner. (Semi-technical photo description warning) It’s basically a camera converted into a projector that’s attached to an optical slave that triggers the projection with a flash at the exact time that someone else is snapping a photo, and projects a chosen image into that photo. I haven’t been able to get Julius von Bismarck’s website to load since the Wired.com article about it came out so you can read more about it here.

This excerpt from the Wired article gives me the warm and fuzzy’s in my stomach, knowing that the inventor seems to realize the potential for the device to be used for ulterior purposes by ad agencies and such, and is patenting it as a means to control usage while at the same time admitting that “it could be a dangerous attack on media.”

Now, imagine for a moment that an ad agency gets hold of this. You couldn’t take a photograph of a tourist attraction ever again without worrying that some marketing crap would be pushed into your camera. As Julius told me, “I see it as a piece of media art. It could be a dangerous attack on media. [But] if people do shit with it, I feel bad.”

Still…I think now that the idea is introduced, it won’t be long before other similar techniques are thought of and used to inject marketing messages into places we wouldn’t ordinarily think of seeing ads. If there is a chance that someone will pay to have their brand or message be viewable and attention grabbing, that way will be found. Hopefully not.