From Concrete Fashion, a short movie that me and Ola Hansson shot last weekend. More photos…

Some art stands on its own while other require a frame of reference to be intriguing. The first kind is unfortunately quite rare and the other kind requires you to read a (usually) dull A4 or talk to the artist. Hidi Slimane is one of those artist whose work doesn’t need an explanation. Both Sweet Bird of Youth, a group exhibition compiled by Slimane for the Arndt and Partner gallery in Berlin, and Young American, a solo exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam, exuberate velvet undergroundesque avant-garde rock. Some people work very hard but they still don’t get it right, well I’m beginning to see the light…

Home Photography by Andrew Sanderson is a very unpretentious collection of personal observations from a photographer who finds inspiration in everyday life. If I had just flickered through this book at a bookshop I probably wouldn’t have thought that it was for me. But I didn’t, and now that I have read it I’m really happy. It has been a bit like being stuck on the porch of a country house on a rainy summer day.

The result of my thesis work at the MSc. in Media Technology and Engineering program at Linkoping University is Pixgis, a novel application for map-centric management of photographs.

Pixgis is an interactive environment in which photographs may be discovered, viewed and managed through maps. With Pixgis finding photographs from a specific location or of a particular structure is as easy as finding the location or structure on a map. As Pixgis simultaneously displays maps, photographs and spatial metadata it also enables users to analyze photographs in new manners.

My thesis report presents Pixgis, illustrates the benefits of applications for map-centric management of photographs, exposes the problems one faces when implementing such applications and presents novel solutions to many of these problems. The thesis also elaborates on spatial metadata and methods for acquisition of photographs with embedded spatial metadata (i.e geotagging).

The application and the concepts it is built upon has received interest from camera and GPS manufacturers as well as potential end users such as disaster-aid organizations, archaeologists and city-planners.

Click on the image above to see a larger screen shot of the application in action. Pixigis is a Mac OS X application developed in Objective C / Cocoa.

Download the report: Pixgis - Thesis Report (10MB, PDF)