Personal Effects Camera
New Modes For Photo Generation
Why the Personal Effects Camera was created:
Through a collaborative effort of the Israeli government, a main stream media conspiracy, and an anonymous third party techno-dev company, a memory augmentation camera was devised to aid Gilad Shalit in his re-assimilation into society. Their preconceived idea was to reshape Shalit’s relationship to the Israeli citizens by convincing them to collectively adopt Shailt as a family member or friend, perpetuate his non-role in a middle east conflict, and lastly, have him suspend his actual memory of personal relationships in order to adopt a collective and shared memory with the citizens of his country of origin.
Once this trio won over their collective audience, they decided to go into production. They devised a hybrid camera and fictitious memory viewer to be used by Shalit himself to unify his image with a collection of alternative family photos collected from different events from around the country throughout Shalit’s life. This data base of imagery sourced from people all over the country would be used as canvases to impose Shalits image into.
With the use of 3D scans of Shalit’s facial expressions and body postures a second data base was created in order to unify with the collective data base. These hybrid images of Shalit posing with Israeli citizens he had never met started reshaping his memory and acceptance of ever citizen as a family member.
The Memory Augmentation Camera triples as an actual camera, an image viewer for hybrid images in the database, and as a unique feature that would allow Shalit to photograph others and impose himself into the image from being behind the lens. This challenged his role as viewer and participant as well as his relationship to the people he was photographing.
Research revealed that Shalit’s emotional response to the images produced had an interesting effect. He accepted those in the photos as family members and the events as memories. But there was unexpected result. He adopted every Israeli citizen as a member of his close family. His expectations however, were not met with regard to dynamic familial relationships.
Special thanks to: Bitzy and Josh EIchenbaum
