Ovidiu Cincheza & Marte Roel
Ovidiu Cincheza & Marte Roel “These works were born naturally as a conjunction of interests while we were living together in an artist residence in Barcelona; Ovidiu (RO) as a photographer and programmer, and Marte (MX) as a musician and interaction designer. We like to create engaging fun works, with which people can easily connect. We managed to merge our interests into a series of photography installations that react to people’s gestures. In these works, we provide a set of gestures under which people can behave meaningfully in manners that would not be generally appropriate in public contexts; this, in order to take a picture of themselves. Through such construct, we acquire an anthropological collection of pathetic human behaviour; but that at the same time is engaging, meaningful and fun within its context. Partly, the inspiration for building some of these machines came from the idea of reediting classic photography projects; between them are Phillipe Halsman’s Jump Book and Inge Morath and Saul Steinberg’s Masquerade project. Photo booths are well known in urban spaces, and have been commonly used for decades; recently, the accessibility of new digital technologies has prevented these booths from being of particular interest for people, and moreover, new generations of young people. These booths provide a wonderful palette of fun and accessible interaction for pretty much anyone and have proved to be successful in various spaces and contexts. The work that we propose is different from that of a common photo booth software; since we encompass it in a public situation and use novel modes of interaction with photography, where the user himself has a certain level of agency over taking the photograph. From a more general standpoint accoun-
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ting for the history of photography (which began well more than 100 years ago and was linked to the industrial revolution); we are at an interesting point of the development of such discipline. Although some people debate about whether photography is dying, we believethat this era is clearly a turning point for it. Today, a growing community of local makers are born within a globalized economy, and authors are even proposing the idea of a third industrial revolution. Our photo booths are born from this paradigm, where novel and meaningful models for photography built by,and for, the local community are proposing new paths for this discipline.