Day: August 15, 2010

Dump.fm has added a new feature called "fullscreen," that takes the most recent image posted to the chat room and automatically resizes it to fill the browser window.
Last night Ryder Ripps veejayed an Anamanaguchi show in Brooklyn with a projected version of "fullscreen." Dumpers were alerted beforehand and for an hour or so the group's collective efforts fed the screen a constantly changing procession of pics, animated gifs, movie clips, and text-bites that might be up from anywhere to a fraction of a second to...a few seconds.
The automatic resizing and fast, continuous chat room feed solves some problems with live presentation of GIFs. In 2008 GIFs of mine appeared in a live group screening in Chicago organized by Dain Oh. Animations were placed on browser tabs and the performance consisted of moving from one tab to another (with live piano accompaniment!). Dain's vimeo documenting the event looks and sounds great but there is a certain amount of logistics of navigating between live internet images: sizing, scrolling, and cropping are being constantly fiddled with in real time. The Dump chat room + fullscreen solves the logistics/down time issues and results in an almost seamless flow. Ripps was also dumping and had a screen name "~photobot" feeding images into the chatroom so he had more control than just watching others dump. Needless to say it was all uncensored/filtered.
Was discussing with some people yesterday how or if dump.fm could be presented in a "live" space such as a gallery. Fullscreen would be the best way, I think, but it would need to be set up and scheduled as a piece of performance art. Dump.fm is best for lurkers, watchers, and non-participants when everyone in the chat room is "on."
Fullscreen is still a compromise because it eliminates some dump specialties such as multi-image "shrines" and tiling. But for a live situation it would be powerful - I was torn between the fullscreen tab and wanting to see what was happening in the chat room - the fullscreen was mesmerizing. Can only imagine how it looked behind a live band.

Update: This is a good time to give a shoutout to the "dump team" that has given us so many good innovations (including the fullscreen feature described above): Tim Baker, Stefan Moore, Scott Ostler, and Ryder Ripps, who are described on the about page, except those pictures aren't to be trusted. From what I've seen, ideas, suggestions, and criticisms come from other dumpers too numerous to name, or who have screen names that are not work safe.

Update 2: The "~photobot" screenname I mentioned is a script that dumps images sent to an email address at dump. Not sure if the address has been publicized so will hold off on posting it till I know for sure.