Flitser
Find a mirror, activate the flash and make a self portrait.
Artistic iPhone app collaboration with Roel Wouters and Jonathan Puckey. The app invites you to take self portraits in the mirror, while having flash on.
For the 5DaysOff festival 2011 in Amsterdam, together with Roel Wouters and Jonathan Puckey we developed a special photo app, Flitser. The iPhone app browses through a collection of photos all taken in the mirror with flashlight on. Since it runs only on an iPhone 4 and up —which features a flash next to the camera—, users could also add their own photos to the catalogue.
Roel Wouters and Jonathan Puckey were invited by the NIMk, who curated the art section of the 5DaysOff festival in 2011, to execute an earlier concept of theirs. They had already assembled a collection of self-portrait photos taken in mirrors with the flashlight on. All these photos have of course a flaw with them, in that the flash is reflected in the photo as well and overexposes the image. Jonathan and Roel decided to use especially this feature of the overexposed flash and animate it.
By touching the screen in browse mode, the user can position the flash directly underneath their finger. That is to say: it selects the photo from the catalogue where the overexposed flash in the photo is positioned directly there, underneath the finger. And by swiping you can toss and drag this flash around, bouncing it off the side of the screen. The animation created through this is quite chaotic and hectic, because every frame of the animation is a totally different user generated picture, with but one constant: the overexposed flash moving from frame to frame.
Technically this project was kind of a challenge due to the amount of photo data that every user collects and which should be distributed back to every user. Together with Frank Huffener who built the backend of the app, we used Amazon’s S3 service to store the huge amount of data, and made special arrangements for uploading and downloading the photos, even in harsh networking conditions.
The app is a fun app to make photos and play with. But it is also strangely voyeuristic as you browse through the collection of self-portraits of totally different strangers.
