Collage Capture

Screen Capture of a collage in progress.

The image generating tool is an original software program titled Live Collage. The program generates topically driven projected collages of images and text in real time from information sources on the Internet including social media, news feeds, viewer contributions, public domain knowledge and image repositories. 

Oahu Collage (detail)

Screen Capture of a collage in progress.

Each collage takes anywhere from 2-5 minutes to construct and then dissolve.  It is never the same, and no object or record is created.  Input from Twitter, including specific hashtags are the source and the basis by which the program searches for related images and text.   Live Collage analyzes tweets for parts of speech, and then collects associated and tagged images and textual shorts from online sources. Image transformations, transparency level, color, size, effects, and placement is randomized.

Installation View

Installation View

The exhibition was split into two channels, one based on posts from Oahu, and the other based on posts about here - containing the words Oahu, Waikiki and Hawaii.  The collages are a live reflection of social media interactions as recently as the last few minutes. Viewers were invited to contribute to the exhibition by including the hashtag #uhgetaway in tweets or uploading a non-copyrighted image tagged with uhgetaway to Flickr.

Collage Building 1/9

The following nine images show a collage building, these are all iterations of the same set which last aproximately 3 minutes before dissolving and building a new one.  Image 1/9

Collage building 2/9

Image 2/9

Collage building 3/9

Image 3/9

Collage building 4/9

Image 4/9

Collage building 5/9

Image 5/9

Collage building 6/9

Image 6/9

Collage building 7/9

Image 7/9

Collage building 8/9

Image 8/9

Collage building 9/9

Image 9/9

Introductory Projection

Introductory Signage Projection

Get Away is a collaboration between James Thario and Jen Thario.   James Thario is a full-time software engineer with a MSE from Regis University, Denver.  His work explores social influences on collaborative software development.   Live Collage has been created with and depends on free and open source software and content including Eclipse, Stanford Natural Language Parser, various Apache Foundation projects, ImageMagick, Squid, Flickr Creative Commons, and Wikipedia.