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Renowned Author and Digital Artist Team Up to Create First Ever Instant Global Portrait Using Camera Phones
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On October 12, 2005 at the Mobile Imaging Summit executive conference in Monterey (CA), a major work of art was created live in front of an audience, in a collaborative process involving over one hundred individuals in countries ranging from Brazil to Indonesia.
Entitled “The 5 Minute World”, the project was the brainchild of a team composed of Alexis Gerard, President of Future Image which hosts the Mobile Imaging Summit executive conferences and author of “Going Visual” ; Rick Smolan, author and creator of the best-selling photography books in history including the Day in the Life and America 24/7 books ; and pioneering digital artist Laurence Gartel whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Joan Whitney Payson Museum and Long Beach Museum of Art among others, and figures in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the Bibliotheque Nationale. It was made possible by technology and support from Hewlett-Packard and Motorola.
The “5 Minute World” demonstration was designed as an evolution of the concept Smolan has become famous for: Utilizing photography to create a portrait of humanity as it exists within a defined period of 24 hours, or a week. By using camera-phones, which have the ability to transmit an image wirelessly shortly after it is captured, that period can be condensed into a matter of minutes.
For the event, over one hundred Motorola employees around the world were photographed with Motorola camera-phones including the V635 and new RAZR V3x, displaying the front page of the day’s newspaper in their local town. The images were transmitted to a web page created specially for the event, where they appeared on the conference’s large projection screen as they filtered in, forming an instant composite of faces and headlines of interest across the globe while Rick Smolan explained the concept and process to the conference attendees as part of his keynote speech.
Meanwhile Laurence Gartel, present on stage alongside Smolan, downloaded the images to his computer and placed them into a poster template which he created specifically to commemorate the occasion. He then printed the resulting 24x36 inch image on to a DesignJet 130 NR high-resolution large format inkjet printer from Hewlett-Packard. By the time Smolan’s speech was over, Gartel held up for the audience a finished piece of art which included the contributions of people all across the globe.
The final phase of the event was the production of a special limited edition of 500 copies of the Laurence Gartel poster on an HP Indigo Press 5000. Using the Indigo variable printing technology, the first 400 posters of the edition were not only numbered but also inscribed to the name of each participant – whether they contributed images to the poster, or were part of the live audience that witnessed the poster’s creation (a number of the remaining numbered copies are available through Laurence Gartel)
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 Humanity has a deep need to tell stories and this is why photographs are so important to people,” said Smolan. “In 2003 digital cameras outsold film cameras. In 2004 cell phone cameras outsold digital cameras. By the end of 2005, a billion ordinary people will be carrying camera-phones with them 24/7. The ability to shoot and then instantly share images is going to dramatically change the way humanity sees itself and how each of us tells our own stories.
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 The explosive growth in personal network-connected image capture devices is a fundamental shift, comparable for instance to the rapid spread of PCs in the 90’s – but on a much larger scale” said Alexis Gerard, President, Future Image Inc. “Just as ubiquitous PCs converged with other technologies to birth the mass-market Internet, ubiquitous camera-phones will converge with emerging technologies like image recognition, virtual displays, and others that were topics at our recent Summit, to change business and society in profound ways. |
 The ‘5 Minute World’ demonstration is a perfect example of how mobile imaging is enabling consumers around the world to capture and share their moments, seamlessly,” said Brian Krasavage, Director, Business Planning, Mobile Imaging & Video Capture, Motorola, Inc. “At Motorola, we’re committed to enhancing this rich mobile experience by creating handsets that are intuitive and connected and supporting an entire ecosystem of solutions for sharing, storing and printing life’s everyday memories |
 HP is pleased to lend its imaging technology to enable this truly first-of-its-kind event, which will allow hundreds of people to connect in a way that was not possible in the analog world,” said Aaron Weiss, director of business development, Digital Photography and Entertainment, HP. “Digital photography has forever changed the way people capture moments and share stories and memories with friends, family and colleagues around the globe. This event is an excellent proof point of the great possibilities enabled by digital photography. |
T he "5-Minute World" project illustrated how technology has enabled us to communicate on an instant basis, eliminating the time structure ofprevioussocieties. The real challenge of the future is to capture every living moment. Will that be done with a "third" camera eye embedded in one's forehead? Or a "direct connect" from your eye to a storage device? We have not had time to digest the social implications of how digital has changed our memories, our relationships, and our eventual ‘after life.’ Yet we are definitely going where no man has gone before!" Laurence Gartel, November 10, 2005 |
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