Sarah Hatton:::

Supacollager, 2008, Isaac Wallis, Joseph Adams, Sarah Hatton, participatory art

Supacollager, 2008, presented at the '08 Participatory Design Conference, Bloomington, Indiana

Supacollager is a participatory art project that uses a combination of gesture recognition and web search to allow people to rapidly create web-image collages. Presented at the 2008 Participatory Design Conference, Supacollager was designed to query a flickr group that pointed to images of the conference. All of these images were tagged by the conference attendees. When attendees sat down to make a new collage, they were able to mash up images of the conference by thinking of words relating to the conference themes. You can link to the flickr group here. The collages that participants made were printed out on postcards for people to take. They were also projected in a multimedia presentation that changed dynamically when users made a new collage.

Tools, software, scripts, media, materials, ephemera:

Python (with relevant imaging libraries), the flickr API, Quartz Composer, postcard, printer, projector

Video of Supacollager at the PDC

Supacollager Documentation from Sarah Hatton on Vimeo.

Supacollager first asks the participant what they want in their collage

Step 1 of Supacollager involves the system asking the participant what they want in their collage. They are asked three times.

The Supacollager gesture recognition and collager interface

Step 2 involves creating the many layers of the collage. The participant can access the three things they searched for by drawing a 1, 2, or 3 for the respective queries. Drawing the 1, 2 or 3 sideways or backwards skews the image and layers it in different ways. The participant can repeat this process over and over until they are pleased with their collage. The above image shows the gesture recognition interface. For the 2008 PDC, the images were pulled from flickr by matching the queries with the photo tags, however, Supacollager can work with any web-based photo search and in the past it has used Yahoo.

a PDC attendee makes a collage with Supacollager

At the PDC, people could come and sit down and make as many collages as they wanted. When they were finished with their collage, the artist printed their collage on a postcard. The attendees could take their postcard or choose to take one made by someone else.

Collage post cards wait to be picked up by PDC attendees

The yellow sheets direct participants to upload their photos to flickr

The PDC 08 Supacollager set up: two laptops, printer, post card paper, Wacom tablet, projector

PDC original collage example, words queried: food, green, woman

Example of collage made at 08 PDC, words queried: people, conference, workshop