The Cannes case film. A wartime piece, and it does not soften what it is about.
When a country is invaded its heritage is frequently a target, not collateral damage. The conventional response is expert teams, specialist rigs and funding rounds, all correct and all far too slow for a war. Meanwhile photogrammetry had quietly become an app in millions of pockets.
Give the whole country the scanner and let civilians back up their own heritage before it is gone.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Hand the preservation of a nation's cultural record to untrained members of the public with phones, during an active invasion, using a consumer app. No conservation qualifications, no capture protocol, no quality control at the point of collection.
Smart: An imperfect scan of a building that no longer exists is infinitely more valuable than a perfect scan that was never made. The word “backup” does the training, and the institutional partners do the legitimacy and the archiving.
The steal: when a job is bottlenecked on scarce experts, check whether the hard part has quietly become a consumer app. Your idea is then not the technology, it is the single familiar word that tells millions of untrained people what to do with it.
It is useful before it is communication. Most purpose work is a film about a problem; this is a functioning tool that produced an asset which did not exist before. Digital Craft Grand Prix at Cannes 2022.
The naming. “Digitally document at-risk heritage through crowdsourced photogrammetry” is the same project and nobody does it. “Back up Ukraine” is an instruction a teenager can follow this afternoon.
Act-poweredThe archive is real and people really filled it. Has to be seen to work.
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: