TL;DR: While in Mexico, I started photographing the walls in a city with my iPhone. The gallery of 100 photos that I accumulated then turned into a local carpentry project, a termite infestation, and eventually a website with a mapped wall archive.
This was just one of those things that starts out as a flicker of an idea and then snowballs.
I was staying at a hostel in Valladolid Mexico and while everyone else was going to Chichén Itzá and doing cenote tours, I was distracted by the walls of the city.
As you’re walking around and looking at all these cool old walls, what you’re really wanting to do is take out a hammer and chisel and remove a small square section from each of them, to bring home in your suitcase. And then you’d want to use mortar to assemble all those square sections into a brand new wall that you could show people and say ‘Look at this wall of walls, isn’t it great!’…
That’s kind of what you’re thinking. But since that’s not practical or legal, you have to use your iPhone instead.
Your phone is the hammer and chisel. It allows you to capture a digital representation of these 500 year old structures that you’re standing in front of. The physical wall is comprised of tiny bits of sand and rock whereas the digital photo of that wall is comprised of tiny pixels.
So after walking around for a while, you end up with a big pile of these square wall sections that you’ve ‘chiseled’ out with your phone. If you just wanted to build a digital wall, or gallery, then you’d be done at this point.
But you’d still like to build a physical wall.
So you send all the digital pixels to a printer and it converts each square section of wall back into a physical object, not in the form of sand and rock, but in the form of tiny ink droplets sprayed onto tiny fibers of paper.
You can’t assemble those fibers of paper with mortar but you can frame them in wood and hang them on a wall. Voila!
You can see my digital wall chiselings here. Aren’t they great!
How an iPhone was used:
- Booking plane tickets through Google Flights app
- Transportation to airport through Uber app
- Buying bus tickets in Mexico through ADO app
- Finding a hostel through Hostel World app
- Google Maps for navigation
- Mobile banking & payments
- Using Google Translate app for communication
- Capture & internal storage of photos
- Video recording & internal storage of footage
- Organization of media in Photos app
- External transfer of media to cloud storage
- Video editing with iMovie app
- Publishing to internet with YouTube app
- Geotagging