The
Blind Camera is a camera that takes photographs for you, but not of what you see. Instead, it takes photographs that someone else, somewhere else in the world, is taking at the same moment you press the shutter button.
It was created by
Sascha Pohflepp as a kind of explorational design fictional artifact to explore themes of photography, memory, and the networked nature of image-making in the digital age. I believe he did it while a student at the Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art in London.
The original Blind Camera connects to a networked photo sharing service (like Flickr) and when you press the shutter button, it looks for photos that were taken at the same time as you pressed the button. It then downloads one of those photos and stores it on the camera's memory card. The Blind Camera is a design fiction project by Sascha Pohflepp, created in 2006 as part of his degree at the Digital Media class of the Berlin University of the Arts. The project explores themes of photography as a networked practice, the evolution of image-making techniques, and the changing nature of photography in the digital age.
If I extrapolated the tendency for cameras, recorders of various modes and such to be early windows into possible new forms of sense-making and seeing/hearing, it is not too hard to make that extrapolation to cameras and such that are specific to AI-based image-making, and I have no doubt that this would've been a project Sascha would have been experimenting with, for sure.
This also reminds me of the
Poetry Camera project which is a camera that takes a photo of a scene and then delivers a poem based on what it sees, using AI to analyze the scene and generate a poem that captures its essence. The Poetry Camera is another example of how cameras can be used to explore new forms of sense-making and expression.