MyI presents a collaborative-collective front page based on the concept that the accumulation of constantly updating unedited images from a multitude of viewpoints more accurately depicts contemporary society and events.
An app that allows users to instantaneously upload media from handheld devices to the Internet, MyI builds on the use of ubiquitous photography in modern technology as a key motivator and communicator for activism and information. As witnessed during recent movements in the Middle East, the Arab Spring became possible because people could send images or video directly to any server. While the primary media/news distribution models are often filtered, censored, and biased; the citizen’s voice arrived unedited and built through mass participation and raw exposure. The public is no longer confined to a verbal or textual narrative attached to images by distributing media conglomerates.
Does the same approach apply to a collective consciousness in photography today? When interpreting a large breadth of images, we are more able to grasp the complexity of the public voice when orchestrated by many perspectives. This method of presentation facilitates our ability to develop our own interpretation. Pictorially, we also see a shift from previous hi-res standards to a reliability in low-res sources. Hyper-real or polished images are synonymous with selective image manipulation; therefore, mobile devices offer a visual immediacy associated with un-doctored documentation.
The MyI project was developed by Wafaa Bilal, Shawn Lawson, and Mike Snyder. The app enables users to link their Android or iPhone camera to a central server, their Flikr page, and/or personal website to simultaneously stream each new photograph. The photographs are automatically taken at a continuous rate of one image per minute. The MyI website is the central server where images can be experienced as the collaborative-collective stream. The simple, yet dynamic site, will place images in accordance to their time and position on the map. Our hope is to establish uncensored access for everyone to communicate their experiences to the world.
Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal, an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, is known internationally for his on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international politics and internal dynamics. For his current project, the 3rdi, Bilal had a camera surgically implanted on the back of his head to spontaneously transmit images to the web 24 hours a day – a statement on surveillance, the mundane and the things we leave behind. Bilal’s 2010 work "...And Counting" similarly used his own body as a medium. His back was tattooed with a map of Iraq and dots representing Iraqi and US casualties – the Iraqis in invisible ink seen only under a black light. Bilal's 2007 installation, Domestic Tension, also addressed the Iraq war. Bilal spent a month in a Chicago gallery with a paintball gun that people could shoot at him over the internet. The Chicago Tribune called it "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time" and named him 2008 Artist of the Year.
Bilal's work is constantly informed by the experience of fleeing his homeland and existing simultaneously in two worlds – his home in the "comfort zone" of the U.S. and his consciousness of the "conflict zone" in Iraq. Bilal suffered repression under Saddam Hussein’s regime and fled Iraq in 1991 during the first Gulf War. After two years in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, he came to the U.S. where he graduated from the University of New Mexico and then obtained an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2008 City Lights published "Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun," about Bilal's life and the Domestic Tension project.
Shawn Lawson is an artist and programmer whose practice mimics science's intent to acquire new knowledge and to gain a better understanding of reality. His experiential artworks explore the intersection of new technologies on consciousness and perceptions of time. His artwork has exhibited in museums, galleries, festivals, and public space in England, Russia, Italy, Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, Malaysia and the USA. Lawson's collaborative, Crudeoils, critiques structures of power: surveillance, economic exploitation, and authoritarian corruption. The collaborative is represented by Dean Jensen Gallery. He has been awarded grants from the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts and the Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds Program.
Lawson studied fine arts at Carnegie Mellon University and École Nationale Supèrieure des Beaux-Arts. He received his MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Visualization in the Department of Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Mike Snyder is a recent graduate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute having obtained his M.S. in Computer Science in May 2011. As an undergraduate, Snyder obtained both a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Electronic Media, Arts, and Communication.
Snyder's focus is on the integration of art and science in ways that make data and information more usable and understandable. His past projects span areas of user interface design, data visualization, graphic design and templating, and online collaboration and development tools.
