Narrative Velocity [587]
Greetings from the side of the road...
I’m Christian Payne, photographer and writer and currently on the road. In this weekly dispatch I seek out novelty, explore the relations between things, how we share, what we share and consume, plus where we might be going.
Thanks for joining in.
#TheAction
I’m on the way home after having been away for 10 days. It’s been an absolute blast. From full immersion of EMF camp to catching up with as much family as possible.
Not sure how I can summarise EMFcamp and do it justice. If I could only choose to go to one big event a year it would be EMFcamp. But it’s only every 2 years and that makes me a little sad. But then something this amazing takes time. And so be it. Roll on 2028. If you have got the hint I'll see you there. If you don’t make it… it was never meant to be and your life will just have to stay half lived. ;-)
The bits between the talks and the workshops are my favourite bit but if it’s the talks you are after you can see some of the here.
I’ve pulled the van over to write this. I’m over 900 mies into the 1000mile there-and-back-again journey and keep getting diverted due to accidents. Thankfully I have a desktop full of photos that will remind me what I wanted to share.
I’ll be home just long enough to tame the inevitable jungle that will meet me on my arrival. Then I’m off again. No slowing down just yet.
#TheSeen
A moving short film with some great acting.
“One person’s problem is another person’s industry.”
This 50+ year old BBC documentary on advice columnists had me ponder how social media inverted the advice column model.
Instead of a handful of advice columnists with nationwide readerships, we now have millions of micro advice columnists with international audiences. Everyone has a platform.. an opinion.. and as a result… advice.
#TheWords
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” ― Nicholas G. Carr
Word of the week… Stigmergy.
Twenty years ago I wrote this piece on my blog discussing CCTV. If I read it today, I’d probably think it had been written by AI. Obviously it wasn’t. ChatGPT and the wave of consumer AI tools were still 16 years away. The images were all taken by me, but the first image was manipulated in Photoshop. I took the photograph in a CCTV control room and to hide the location, composited a picture of myself looking into a wide-angle lens onto the CCTV monitors.
Discussing AI generated imagery on a photo blog is certain to rattle a few cages. Mine was.
I really enjoy Flak Photo but have a personal policy to block, or at least unsubscribe to photo blogs that continually pollute the feeds with unnecessary generated imagery. And at this particular time in my internet loving life, I feel fake photos out of context is unnecessary.
Andy does add the context but some readers still thought the images on the site were real. This is the post discussing that AI imagery has its place in photography. And this was my comment on the post…
I’m a little tired of the arguments about whether AI images can be beautiful or emotionally moving, as they clearly can.
So let us talk about photography’s unique relationship with reality.
A photograph is caused by light reflected from a real person, a real place or genuine moment. Even if it’s staged or manipulated, it still begins with something that actually existed in front of the camera.
AI images just don’t have that connection. They can convincingly imitate the look of photography, but they don’t record an actual event.
That’s a majour distinction. Photography isn’t just a way of making pictures... it’s a way of preserving memory and history.
I’m sure a few photographers reading this would argue that its value lies as much in the encounter with the world as in the final image. The walk, the waiting, the chance meeting or the changing light. All of it feeds into the decisive moment and shapes the photograph in ways that can’t be generated from a prompt.
AI may become a powerful creative medium in its own right, but rather than replacing or extending photography, I think it occupies a different space.
Photography remains one of the few media that lets us say, with confidence, “I was there and this happened.”
And I love it for that.
Although I’ll no doubt shut up when the battle is lost… you can read the full minirant and the responses here… AI imagery masquerading as photography.
#TheHeard
I’m currently listening to Hole Dweller’s album ‘Flies the Coop’.
Thanks to Chin Badger Media for recommending the Rare Earth Podcast from the BBC. It’s well worth a listen. I’ve listened to three episodes on this drive.
#TheConsumed
Freeloader is a food, drink and blagging blog I have not read before.
Last week you may have spotted a glimpse of this bottle in my last post.
Club-Mate is a lightly sparkling German soft drink made with caffeine extracted from the South American yerba mate. Although the drink is an evolution of a Bavarian mate recipe from the 1920’s, the modern version was introduced in 1994.
I first saw it in the hands of Germany’s hacker and maker communities, around Berlin and Austria. It’s an acquired taste for some, but with its dose of caffeine and low sugar content it’s become the unofficial fuel of hackathons, hack spaces and open-source/geek gatherings like EMF camp.
If you see it at an event, buy it. It doesn’t stay on the shelf for long and I’ve seen dedicated apps and shelf mounted webcams built on the fly to specifically alert the addicted to fresh stock.
#TheFound
As I was staying not far away from my childhood home this week I took my kids on a nostalgic trip to see my old stomping ground. For around 8 years I was brought up in a caravan on a smallholding, away down a bridle path.
The woods surrounding our home hid a variety of my dens as well as an old ‘fallout shelter’ from the Cold War. At least that’s what we thought it was. There was a large antenna base nearby and an oil tank to fuel a generator, still half full.
Back then, 1982-7, we were just able to squeeze into a small square vent round the back and had access to three rooms.
I was always starting clubs or secret societies and as this was in the woods, it was our base of operations for the N.T.C.S. (National Tree Climbing Society.)
I was certain I've mentioned this in a past post but can’t find it. It might be in a podcast….
On finding this place this week I knew we were not far from some of the trees we used to climb and claim with small red flags nailed to the top. We would leave our initials and the date we ‘conquered’ the tree.
So walking the track and craning my neck, I wondered if any have them had survived.
One had.
Squinting into the lush canopy above us, I could just make out a tattered piece of red fabric flapping in the light breeze.
It was a square of polyester I had cut from my grandmothers old synthetic eiderdown.(as she called it), duvet to us.
The photo above was taken on a 5x zoom and I contemplated if I could climb up to get close enough to see if any wording was left on the flag. But thought better of it.
Despite me having successfully ‘littered’ the woods with these little squares over four decades ago, I congratulated myself on the choice of fabric.
My kids having heard the story of this club were dumfounded and amazed. They asked me how I could possibly climb so high when I was only small. I explained that although we’d usually get as high as a house, the trees have grown a bit over the last 40 years.
#TheThings
Walking around Rugby Town I was surprised to find four shops seriously trading in trading cards and all seemingly doing well. Three were open while one took Wednesdays off. Probably to count their cash.
Apart from the book shop, the owners in these shops pointed to Pokémon as the main driver of business, with Magic: The Gathering and D&D role playing in store bringing in a steady crowd.
A decade or more ago, I’d have assumed these were just hobby shops. Today they feel like a cross between a board games cafe, an antiques dealer and a small stockbroker.
One owner who specialised in sending cards away to be graded, told me that trading Pokémon cards has repeatedly outperformed shares, crypto and even gold. Whether or not that’s true across the market I’m not sure. And he certainly had some skin in the game. He recently sent a card suspected to be worth £1000 to be graded at the cost of about £100. It was with the graders for so long that it came back worth £6000 with his fee bumped up to £400.
I have a little personal experience of this when a while ago I found some old MTG cards from my childhood. Using an app to value them, I was amazed that these little pieces of card could be worth so much and have themselves become an asset class people are very serious about.
Next time I see a stack of Pokémon cards in a charity shop, (and I do) I shall look at them a little more closely.
I want this Binface t-shirt so bad.
There are more designs on the Binface merch site.
The epic EMF camp badge from two years ago could be updated this year with an add on mod to make it even more awesome. Here are a few I saw.
#TheLinks
A private mission launches to put jetpacks on old satellites.
Iraq, trapped between Iran and the US.
Somebody on the Documentally community map appears to be reading this dispatch in the Atlantic Ocean and is making me want to go sailing.
More tales of AI going rogue.
Writing by hand is good for your brain.
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#TheThanks
Thank you those lovely people who support my time here with a supporting subscription. You’re awesome. ♥️
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All errors in this post are proof of a human doing work with their tired and slightly rushed mind. I’m very much looking forward to getting home. Not far now.
If you don’t see me in the feeds for a bit it’s because next week I'll be far away from lots of things. Including mobile and web coverage. If I get the chance, I'll send up a flare for some of you.
Till then, enjoy the summer and have a great couple of weeks!
“I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.” ― Margaret Mead
Inform.
See you out there.
Over…
Saving up for next EMF camp. I will never stop fighting AI 😭😭😭. Love that one of your red flags is still there! :)