I found the idea of these paparazzi bots both amusing and interesting. The installation by Ken Rinaldo at the House of World Cultures in Berlin is meant to be a commentary not just on the paparazzi that we think of when the term is used, but also of the Facebook generation’s usage of photos on the social networking site, where normal users are painted as having glamorous lifestyles in some sense, even if they are just shots of a night out at a bar with some friends – a trend of ‘self-publicity’, as it is described.
Comprised of multiple cameras and sensors on a custom-built rolling platform, the Paparazzi Bots move at the speed of a walking human. They select a person to photograph, automatically stop, adjust their focus and record the moment with several flashes. The photos are then propagated using the press, the web, and social networking sites, elevating their subjects to ‘celebrities’ and ‘celebritising’ the Paparazzi Bots along with them.
The whole self-publicity trend (nice phrase) raises a lot of questions in my mind as I observe myself and others in my network using Facebook in different ways, with different privacy concerns. To many people, privacy is of not much concern – they’re the ones with the tendency for self-publicity, whereas to some it dominates their every waking thought.
[Via Cool Hunting]
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