MPPS: Mobile Phone Photo Show

Connecting the dots between a new global community of personal camera phones

A gallery exhibit that invited participant artists from all over the world to send in camera photos that would appear in the gallery in real time.
Camera phones had just become available, this was pre- iPhone and any social media that connected photography from phones.
The concept was to create a meta-snapshot of the planet; to collect as many photos as possible from around the world at a single moment in time.
The show had 400 participants from as far away as Siberia, Argentina, and Finland.

We invented Instagram!

Well, we created a camera phone based community before it was a thing, but we didn't have an infrastructure and the time wasn't right.

We turned the gallery experience inside out. The audience became artists and the gallery functioned as a hub for a global effort.

It was 2002 and suddenly we had camera's on our phones. WTF? Digital camera's had been around for a few years but the phone made the camera "connected".

Photo's were low quality and there were little or no options for doing anything with them. Attaching the photo to an email was about it.

It was Instagram before there was any means of sharing photos from a phone other than email. But the infrustructure was not there yet to support the idea.