In mid-January of 1998 I happened on a chat at the office about the Jennicam site and the idea seemed interesting enough to investigate. A young woman, a recent Economics grad called Jennifer, [aka JKR] had set up a constantly working web camera in her bedroom in a Washington, D.C. apartment that also served as her workplace. Whether she ia working, sleeping, daydreaming, chatting on the phone or entertaining guests anyone on the web can watch.
Since I have Internet access from my desk where I do software design, it was easy enough to grab the new images as they arrived every twenty minutes or so. It's fascinating! It relates closely to work being done by several visual artists I know who are interested in narrative. This set of 100 instant snaps of Jenni's day chronicle her life. They are both a diary and a puzzle about the intermediate time - the room is empty but a chair moves seemingly by itself from one frame to another.
The first evening I cobbled together a Java program to grab the images as they changed and store them locally. Over the next few days I tidied up and generalized the program and made it produce an html file that provided easy access to the collected pictures of which by that time I had several hundred.
Since then I have written another Java program - an applet this time that can be accessed over the net. It takes a list of images and displays them in a slide show format. I've tested the program with several browser versions without problems.
For a while at least I'm going to demonstrate this program by showing some of my archived files. Use the archive's table to select either the list file that provides indirect access to each of the files or the slide show. I'm trying to keep the archives of the previous seven days online. As you can see it's organized day-by-day. And don't hesitate to grab any of these images you like!
Email me with any questions or comments you might care to make at paul@arttech.ab.ca. Look at the archive and have fun!
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