The Descriptive Camera

Matt Richardson's Descriptive Camera takes a photo, uploads it to Amazon's Mechanical Turk service where a human describes the photo, and then the camera prints out that text description. Genius.

I love the results from more abstract shots. This example produced the text that follows, complete with spelling mistakes:

This is a faded picture of a dilapidated building. 

It seems to be run down and in the need of repirs.

In theory you don't need a specific camera to do this - just a way to get any image into the Turk, and somewhere to put the text. Maybe it could be hooked up to a webcam, or tied to a public location such as a park - I've seen similar "text photos" in galleries before, but there's a beauty in tying together an unknown author with an unseen moment in time.