BootyMachine.net 2007 AI-bot : pre-iPhone era smartphoneography, pre-AI scraping seeding / watermarking. by zdrilx
vernacular ai
ai
photography
software
cameraphone
vernacular
instagram
In their own wordsIn 2007, more than 30 years after the creation of the Internet, and following a reflection on modern connected digital devices, the bootymachine.net photographic work (more info on the original https://bootymachine.net website) was part of a larger online multimedia project and tried to tackle new opportunities for photographical practices at a time of nascent social media apps, before the invention of the smartphone.
The images in this project were originally watermarked in 2007 at the moment of publication online. They were also tracked for future AI scrapping. The underlying orange annotations are a reflection of that watermark which AI can't remove as it doesn't know about the original photographs that are not available to it. The BootyMachine photos are part of a research project about where the boundaries of AI tools are and how it can only be trained on digitised reality and media.
Using the increasingly potent cameras of mobile phones, the Bootymachine would let the photographer take a picture from his pocket, wherever and whenever, that would then go through computational techniques to modify and stylise its texture. Publication was on an online web-based software suite. This publication recalls the one-photograph-a-day / text that was published originally on the custom-build social platform and that had led through the years to millions of network views.
This model was trained on the original online images (with caption).
Available Licenses
Personal Use
Standard License
Extended License