How visual life logging is changing photography (SXSW 2014)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Thank you for coming. My name is David McNamara. I'm the Director of Digital Strategy at Iris Worldwide, a global creative innovation network. But today I'm going to be talking to you as a photography geek and my personal journey into the world of visual lifelogging. Yes, here we go. The past is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. This is

[00:00:25] Speaker A: a photo of my granddad. who I never knew. All my memories of him are framed largely through photos and stories from my parents. Through photos, I constructed my own story of who he was, what he did, how he spoke. I created a past that wasn't real but seemed real to me. He was also a lifelogger, a keen amateur photographer. He recorded his sea adventures

[00:00:50] Speaker A: in the Merchant Navy during the 1930s and '40s. in the 1940s, recording the different ships he served on and his daily routines. He logged his life. But he only left a couple of albums, totaling only 100 key photos of his life. It is likely I will leave over 1 million photos for my daughter, who is 2 years old. Will the fact I have more photos mean they are more meaningful

[00:01:15] Speaker A: than my grandfather's? How will my digital legacy be used in the future? And how can I shape it today? So what is visual lifelogging? Visual lifelogging is the act of visually recording your life on a regular basis using a portable device. All these devices can be used for lifelogging, but the difference about wearable devices, as the one I'm wearing today, is that they passively capture

[00:01:40] Speaker A: everything with no prejudice, which is quite different to conventional photography. But visual lifelogging has a history. Launched in 1888 for $25, Kodak were the first to help power lifelogging with their first camera. At the time, it caused a moral panic by camera fiends that were reported at the time photographing people on the beach and in parks. It felt new and

[00:02:05] Speaker A: exciting, yet culturally awkward. Does it sound familiar? And of course, Master photographers have logged life around them since photography was invented. But they were— I like to call them master collectors. They understood both the act of collecting and the art of collection. They set about capturing fading and evaporating worlds. Visual lifelogging is about capturing your own evaporating world. So

[00:02:33] Speaker A: the reason we collect our world is, of course, to understand it. Why are we here, and how are we doing? To do this, you need to examine the data. I was inspired by Steve Mann, one of the pioneers of wearable technology and self-tracking. He talks about learning by being, in the hope we can become better experts of ourselves, believing that quantification can achieve actualization. Visual lifelogging is part

[00:02:58] Speaker A: of the quantified self and photography. It can support both objective, subjective, art, and and science in the quest for closer examination of the self and its environment. Depending on your bias and your reason to log your life will determine what you want to achieve, whether you just want to make better decisions, find insights, reach higher goals, or create meaning through the images that you collect. So

[00:03:24] Speaker A: I went on my own adventure to see what I could learn and discover, approaching the project as a photographer first. And a lifelog a second. I got myself a wearable camera, which is the one I'm wearing today, the Autographer, and set about logging my life. One of my first discoveries was the fact that I fidget quite a lot, and people that know me in the room will probably agree with that. I've accumulated literally hundreds

[00:03:49] Speaker A: of photos of my hands in different poses. But does the fact that I have more photos of my hands mean that I understand my mannerisms any better? Better. I definitely felt I was on the frontier judging by some reactions I received whilst wearing my camera. Announcing acts of disclosure in meetings were met with suspicion, standing behind an ATM and realizing I was intruding on someone's privacy, to

[00:04:14] Speaker A: mean commuter stares on buses and tubes and kind of tense standoffs with markets or traders upset with my camera. I became acutely aware of these unguarded private moments that I was recording. Using Autographer's software, I was able to explore my logged images. I averaged about 700 photos a day and accumulated typically banal categories,

[00:04:40] Speaker A: lots of photos of me sat at my desk, a leader particularly boring lot. It was this experience that I found the most interesting and frustrating. Actually, since most photographers spend most of their time editing. It was this that caused me to consider where lifelogging ends and where photography begins. I have all this data, but now what? And lifelogging is actually hard work. First of all, you have to remember to wear it, charge

[00:05:06] Speaker A: it, download it. It is admin-heavy, and you need to spend time on it. There are 4 broad ways of thinking about your data, from reflection, using your images to analyze your life and daily routines, to recall, using key images to validate a memory of something, to retrieval, using images to find something specific, or indeed reminiscence, which has been talked about today and yesterday at various

[00:05:31] Speaker A: talks in South By, using images to tell stories and share those moments with friends. At times I found it difficult to reconcile my photographer's brain with the reality of passive capture. In some respects, visual lifelogging takes on— takes all the magic out of photography as we understand it today. On occasions, I found myself leaning in to try and force a composition

[00:05:57] Speaker A: or a sense of story, but gradually I became more familiar with it. But the passive capture did work in ways I hadn't imagined, taking very atmospheric and candid and mistake-driven photos of my daily life, pictures of moments I wouldn't ordinarily have captured. For me, lifelogging can surface the visual grammar of daily life, the pauses, the cracks, and the in-between states

[00:06:23] Speaker A: of our lives. It can add another layer of meaning. But we're all taking photos now, which is posing problems for the meaning of photography as a medium. Indeed, there is a crisis in photography today. In a saturated and author-rich world, how can photographers capture true meaning? Photos have become devalued, and images have lost the inherent objective truth they once held in the

[00:06:48] Speaker A: modern world. Subjectivity now reigns. So some photographers have reflected on those images that got away, the ones they missed, or the ones they chose to miss, and they celebrate in the act of not taking photos. In this sense, photography is about affirming experience, creating an aura of talismanic protection around moments. Sometimes to do this you have to put the camera

[00:07:13] Speaker A: down, which is why the promise of visual lifelogging is so seductive, right? The fact you can get the best of both worlds, enjoy the moment and record it with no pollution of the experience. In a recent study, students in an art gallery were more likely to forget the art they took pictures of than those they were merely asked to observe. But there was mitigating evidence of students

[00:07:38] Speaker A: who chose to zoom in on aspects of objects, and they remembered those details much more clearly and sharply. It proves that photography works in different ways with our memory. It's both inspiring and hindering in equal measures. Fundamentally, memory is fallible. It's dynamic, it's volatile, it's malleable. We reconstruct memories all the time. We fill in the blanks, we speculate,

[00:08:04] Speaker A: and we infer things. So can digital archives help to append our memory and make them more true? To do this, we will need a search engine for the self. Lifelogging has a severe information retrieval challenge, and again, that's a key thing— key theme that we heard at South by Southwest. This is about organizing your digital life, your digital footprint. We need better ways to discover and

[00:08:29] Speaker A: find serendipity in the way you experience your photos. And Dr. Cathal Gurrin from the University of Dublin are working on an e-memory project to do exactly this. So where does visual lifelogging sit within the medium of photography? It is part of the established expressive and intimate genres of photography, too. Photographers reflecting those

[00:08:54] Speaker A: schools on the screen there. It is about the discovery of the self. It is diaristic, subjective, and intimate, using a documentary style to tell personal stories. Visual lifelogging is also part of the new aesthetic. The new aesthetic is a reflection of our times. It is the machine staring back at us. Very glitchy, surreal, and imperfect. This new aesthetic incorporates images that feel machine-authored.

[00:09:21] Speaker A: You get that sense with visual lifelogging. Some artists have explored how they can use their lifelogs for art projects. This artist used 4 years of his photographic archive to create an explorable mindscape as a video game. You could literally navigate his memories and his visual collection. Imagine if we could do the same. This artist has time-traveled with

[00:09:46] Speaker A: her visual lifelogging, placing her contemporary self into photos from her childhood. They're quite disarming and reflective of perhaps key moods or moments in her life. Imagine if we could do the same on a regular basis, to time-travel back to our own childhoods. The glimpse of a near future from the movie, Spike Jonze's new movie, Her, sees how technology

[00:10:11] Speaker A: is neatly folding into our everyday life. The way the sexy operating system organizes the character's digital life makes the idea both appealing and alien at the same time. Like in the movie, there is an inherent tension in the role technology plays in the lives of people and society. The future of lifelogging, for me, depends on a cultural acceptance, smart curation services,

[00:10:37] Speaker A: and a belief in the value of digital legacy management. We know that the world of Her, the movie, is only around the corner. There's somebody called Cognia, it's an artificial intelligence company that builds personal AI agents to help you get on in life, whether it's a virtual butler, a life coach or a health coach. They use machine learning to tailor digital services to your needs.

[00:11:03] Speaker A: It's companies like this that will figure out how to make photography more relevant, accessible, and meaningful in the 21st century. So I believe curation is the answer. It can save us all. It can save us from the photographic singularity that we're on right now. We're seeing companies like Facebook and Google+ finding ways to make sense of all the zettabytes of

[00:11:28] Speaker A: visual lifelogs we're all accumulating. Of course, the look-back videos are rudimentary and crude and slightly cheesy, but imagine having more sophisticated services that could harvest your archives in a richer, more imaginative way. Imagine if your look-back videos had mood data to narrate new stories. So I get quite excited when I get a notification

[00:11:54] Speaker A: from Google+, because I'm a Google+ nerd, when they have auto-enhanced my photos, which is quite wrong, right? As a photographer, I should feel violated that they post-produce my images, but I don't. I want the help to creatively treat my collection. I'm quite— I'm okay with that. Google has actually bothered to figure out at a very simple level those photos that matter by looking at my backup patterns

[00:12:19] Speaker A: to see which moments have been repeatedly shot, therefore creating moments of importance. This is just a brief glimpse as to what's to come. So for me, visual lifelogging is helping photography to evolve to new times. It's making the intimate algorithmic. Algorithmic photography is the next stage of photography, using data, context, and creativity to bring a new dimension

[00:12:45] Speaker A: to the way we think about image-making and the metadata of stories that surround those images. This is about a better way to experience and discover your photos. Today we have the standard EXIF data, something all photographers will be familiar with, which is the column on the left. But in the near future, in my warped mind, This EXIF data

[00:13:10] Speaker A: will be redrawn to include new data sources from tracking devices, social graphs, and public networks. It will include data such as mood points, perhaps sentiment scores, and emotional depth of field. This new metadata will enable new ways of archive interaction. So I've imagined a new photography workflow for the future. Split by a

[00:13:35] Speaker A: quantification layer at the bottom there in blue and a qualification layer at the top there in orange. Or data and creativity, where your visual lifelogging device can sync with other wearable devices and services to aggregate your image metadata. How a curation engine can search for patterns, moments, and auto-tag events. And how a self-learning in-memory cloud can enhance

[00:14:00] Speaker A: your storytelling abilities, breaking down passages of your life into edited comic strips that you can reflect on later, and then choosing to exhibit, share, analyze, or search your visual archive. So through my frustration at visual lifelogging, I dreamt up a possible solution: the Life Curation Agent. The Life Curation Agent is a complete visual lifelogging platform. It can integrate all your life tracking devices,

[00:14:26] Speaker A: auto-curate your life, and enhance your life stories. It's a smart AI editor that can sieve the metadata of your life, helping me relieve the burden of editing my visual narrative. You can adjust the settings to your curation agent, turn on smart album authoring, or perhaps add autobiographical captioning, adjust the level of your story enhance mode, Or

[00:14:51] Speaker A: maybe even turn up temporal location, tracking your gesture and face recognition. Visual lifelogging is about finding halo moments, not every moment. It can surface unseen patterns, motifs, and ghosts in the machine. Halo moments have an aura of majesty about them. That's my daughter, by the way. They are invested with sentiment. These are the prizes of why we visually record our lives. Those

[00:15:18] Speaker A: halo moments could also be scored by points of significance, or even emotional scoring by mood and lifestyle data. And each photo could be tagged with an aesthetic rating, making your archives easier to explore in the future. So to close, visual lifelogging is about building your complete visual archive. It's your life collection. I believe that collection needs to live as an extension of yourself. Not

[00:15:43] Speaker A: as a library. Lifelogging is ultimately a personal act about preserving memories for you and your family. This is about your digital legacy and how you can positively shape it. The partnership of wearable cameras and smart curation services can enhance the capabilities of photography. By using new data sources and intelligent devices, we can concentrate on seeing the world through a new lens. As

[00:16:08] Speaker A: photographers, it gives us new choices to express our view of the world. It can enable new ways to both build and understand our collections. So, you don't have much time in this world, so think about what your legacy will be, what memories you will leave behind, and log life, not data. Thank you. Thank you, Martin.