Ars Electronica announced golden nica winners for 2008! In the category INTERACTIVE ART Julius von Bismarck got a golden nica for the Image Fulgurator. This piece is just awesome. Congrats Julius! Good job, jury!
The Image Fulgurator is a kind of inverted photo camera physically manipulating other peoples pictures in realtime. The exact moment someone takes a picture the Fulgurator does a flash projection onto the photographed object. A sensor detects other camera flashes and synchronizes the flash projection to them. In case of the movie below tourists end up having weird text messages in their pictures. A Checkpoint Charlie sign has an additional message on it but you can’t see it in real. This is a good picture explaining the setup.
Wow! I really like this piece a lot. Just imagine what you could do with this technology. (That’s why he is going for patent.)