George Legrady and Angus Forbes explore the intersection of user generated visual narratives and descriptive social tagging in their installation Cell Tango. The work is a dynamically evolving archive of cellphone-transmitted images contributed by participants from anywhere in the world. The received images are visualized within a virtual 3D architectural structure and organized based on a number of metadata criteria such as cellphone numbers (original contract locations), carriers, time and date of transmission, and participants' contributed categories and descriptive tags. The images and accompanying descriptive categories are projected in the gallery and dynamically change as the image database grows over the course of the installation.

We invite you to submit your images to pix@celltango.org. Be sure to include two to four descriptive tags in the subject line of your message. For example, if you were sending a picture of a birthday cake you could include the following in the subject line of the message: birthday, cake, delicious or celebration.

George Legrady is Professor of Interactive Media in the Media Arts & Technology program at UC Santa Barbara. He is director of the Experimental Visualization Lab, and is one of the first generation of artists in the 1980’s to integrate computer processes into his artistic work, producing pioneering prizewinning interactive projects such as the “Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War” (1993), “Slippery Traces” (1995), “Sensing Speaking Space” (2002), “Pockets Full of Memories” (2001-2007), and most recently “We Are Stardust” (2008) commissioned by the NASA Spitzer Science Center at CalTech.

Angus Forbes is a PhD student and IGERT fellow in the Media Arts & Technology program at University of California, Santa Barbara. His research areas include information visualization, interface design, self-organizing algortihms, and computational linguistics. In 2006 he created the interface to the National Geospatial Digital Archive, a multi-campus preservation initiative funded by the Library of Congress. He founded Synaesthetic Software, Inc. in 2002 to develop music education software.