Ydtechnologious: Cámara Poética: the original poetry camera?

You might remember this post from earlier in the year about a camera that writes poems. It uses a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W together with one of our camera modules and a thermal printer to create poems instead of pictures. Well, Elías Sarquis spotted the post and got in touch to tell us about his creation, Cámara Poética.

Cámara Poética is different, in that it takes captures and keeps the images as well as translating them into poetic verses. Elías calls these “poetographies”. It uses a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 5 MP camera (later upgraded to 8 MP), Google Cloud Vision, and an algorithm based on Markov chains to generate poetic texts. This project required a lot of exploration of how Raspberry Pi works and how Elías could use it to develop this new post-photographic language, as he calls it.

Artistic escape

Cámara Poética was born in 2018 from the maker’s “profound desire” to translate his perspective into words. Elías’ shyness saw him turn to photography at a very young age as a way to express himself and create his own universes.

Elías feels that technology permeates our lives excessively and that we live in an irremediably artificial era. He believes the devices and applications designed by businesses often limit users’ creativity. In opposition to what he sees as this normative technology, Elías decided to create his own device designed around his own sensitivities.

Visor Poetográfico

Elías also created the Visor Poetográfico, which is made up of a 15-inch display, a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a translucent curtain, and a light sensor. This interactive frame automatically loads each photo taken with the Cámara Poética, regardless of where it is located, keeping a real-time record of what the camera sees.