What could possible be more awesome than an #OccupyData hackathon? That’s right: the Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop meme.
And what could be more awesome than a meme? That’s right: a metameme. One of our goals over the last couple of days has been to create just such a metameme. The basic idea is to start by generating a mosaic image of the Pepper Spraying Cop, composed of many tiny remixed Pepper Spraying Cop images. From our initial drawing on the whiteboard, we moved to start thinking about how to do a rapid implementation.
See http://brownbag.me:9001/p/pepperspraymosaic to follow the development
Update: [10.12.11 16.22] ET The game continues. Here some iterations from @numeroteca with metapixel:
Last iteration:
The how to guide and steps:
Pepper Spray Mosaic
Step 1: find a good image archive
Step 2: Download the images from tumblr
The second step was to
Run tumblr.jar . Only downloads the 20 last ones if they on an amazon server. lookig for better option.
Note that this will pull everything from a page of the site. must click through to the next page when needed. It would be awesome to automate this
At one point, we thought that we didn’t have enough images from just one Tumblr to run the mosaic. Happily, KnowYourMeme.com had links to four separate Tumblrs dedicated to the topic:
<schock> we don’t have enough images to do the mosaic, need MOAR pepper spraying cops!
Creating the mosaic
Once we have the images we need, we can create a mosaic using one of several options.
There are web based mosaic generators (examples)
And using this as the main image template of the pepper spray cop
We’ve made it finally with metapixels (available in the repositories of Ubuntu):
Steps
- Create the folder with the photos “photos-folder”
- Create the folder to output them “folder-out”
- Prepare the files: metapixel-prepare photos-folder folder-out (this will generate all the small images that the application will use)
- Make the mosaic: metapixel –metapixel –scale 8 –distance 3 main_pepper_cop.jpg output.png –library out
Files: main_pepper_cop.jpg is the original file; output.png is the output file.
The options: –distance puts the images at this distance; –scale makes the size of the final file, in this case multiplied by 8.
Easy!
In your Ubuntu: share/doc/packages/metapixel/README
Next Steps
We’d like to generalize this as a webservice: OccupyMosaic. Have a huge DB of occupy images and let anyone generate a mosaic out of them. (Then we can have a link to print it out and send it to you, via some webservice that does that).
There are several examples of mosaic webservices – can we copy the code of any of them?
It would be really nice to start a campaign of ‘We Are All Occupy,’ with a microsite, where people take a picture of themselves and upload it, and it autogenerates a mosaic that composes their image using an archive of photos from Occupy. Then ask people to circulate these broadly (share across the social web) as well as download and print them and post them everywhere 🙂
|| A project of #OccupyData ||
3 Responses to “Metameme: Pepper Spray Cop Mosaic”
on March 23rd, 2012 at 7:25 am #
[…] or stop by afterwards. Check out some of the COOL things folks created at Hackathon I, like the metameme of the Pepper Spray Cop and comparison of mainstream media coverage of Occupy versus tweets about […]
on March 23rd, 2012 at 4:19 pm #
[…] neat project that emerged from the UC Davis pepper spray incident — created at the Dec 2011 #OccupyResearch hackathon, including instructions for how this was […]
on March 27th, 2012 at 5:22 pm #
[…] or stop by afterwards. Check out some of the COOL things folks created at Hackathon I, like the metameme of the Pepper Spray Cop and comparison of mainstream media coverage of Occupy versus tweets about […]