After meeting Nathaniel Stern in person today (great!) and engaging in some of his very stimulating ‘collaborative overlap’, I felt inspired enough to take a look at the theme of ‘art’ through the relatively complicated stylistic cum procedural aesthetic that I am developing. The image along side is a compressed 354 x 354 pixel version of the actual work, which in its completeness measures 7087 x 7087 pixels, that translates to 600 x 600 mm at 300 dots per inch (dpi).
This image is the subtly edited, true average combination of 25 images from the top of Google’s large image search results for the term ‘art’, with ’safe search’ turned off. Each individual image was cropped into square format from its top left corner, then enlarged to the much higher final resolution without resampling or antialiasing in order to preserve their original pixel structure and these then layered so that each individual image eventually equally makes up 4% of the final work – in theory that is.
Theory has a way of unravelling :- )
You will be able to make out the typography from a poster for ‘Theatre Sans Animaux: Neuf pi ces fac tieuses.’ a theatre piece which’s title directly translates as ‘Theatre Without Animals’. At 4 percent visual differentiation between images the typography should be mostly illegible, but Google referenced two distinct files of the same poster within the scope of the generatively selective input aspect of my technique.
Basically the poster appears twice, as and thus is roughly 8% of the final image, and I think a bit of combinatronics could be made to show that its visual reconcilability factor goes up by a bit more than that. I considered removing one instance of it from the production equation, but decided against enforcing this kind of authratarian pseodo-democratic equality in the image it for various theoretical and emotive reasons.
Please look into the higher resolution version (1417 x 1417px), still only 20% of the final resolution size.
This is Net Compressionism in as far as it records the digital environment, be it the contemporary world wide web, through the referential popularity filter of search technology of choice for the moment, compresses signal capacity and decompresses figurative integrity.
I am not going to try this, not at home anyway, but in principle, since the source images were of different pixel resolutions, and since those pixel structures have been retained, it should just be possible to computationally analyse the image and relatively successfully extract the source images. I think :- ) Any A.I.’s up for challenge?
I’ll have produced, 4 limited edition enumerated and signed photographic prints of this piece on request – for discerning art buyers with eyes for emergent digital fine art (does that count as a geeky pun?) at very reasonable prices. Things are tight right now so please don’t hesitate.
Alternatively, kind comment would be much appreciated.
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3 Comments
a
very concetual in terms of the make up of the image, but sadly i cannot get passionate about it
maybe if the pages you draw from were about the same issue, it may get some reonance
25 pages of photographs say from sites dealing with AIDS/terrorism/george bush/mandela….
I somehow slept through this post last week (and was reading all the later ones), but yeh DK, I see your point, and am keen to experiment with politcal, site-specific (only .co.za) or perhaps timely (top ten google searches in a day?), or all of the above. Perhaps 10 searches per day for repeat visits? Of course, I’m thinking this as live, screen-bared Net Compressionism rather than printed…
Thanx for the comments guys, I at least partly share your views – though hasten to add that given the preliminary/experimental stage of development these pieces constitute I am pleased with the results. When i started working in this direction last year i was initially discouraged by their tendency to produce generic nondescript marble-y messes – often beautiful messes, but lacking figurative or perceptual access for the non-technically savy viewer – this is not fully resolved yet, but especially since meeting and brainstorming with Nathaniel I sense this can be.
(I can just Photoshop in whatever i think would make them visually work – and to some extent i explored this avenue with the Net Porn series, and will in all likelihood continue those in that direction – but I am not satisfied with that approachs’ adverse impact on either the – let’s call it ‘generative quality’ of the process nor how in my mind that then drifts into the realms of illustration as opposed to art – in my humble opinion.)
I am curious though why you specifically suggest such ‘pathogenic’ themes, okay, except for Mandela, he’s okay :- ) – I have a number of other themes i want to eventually explore (State governance, its intelligence and accountability components especially)- but need to build some new tools to do that effectively – oh for having the tim :- (
But yes, in this case (in geek speak) the scope of input is probably too broad – and I am also not happy with some of the compositional aspects – hope to find some time somewhere to address these issues in a way that integrates accessibility, conceptual focus and procedural ‘integrity’ in these. Though i think it is going to be worth while to build a long time record of ‘Google’s view’ on art in this fashion – and probably eventually compose something more exciting from the result, say a kind of graphic novel documenting Google learning about art – as all indications are that the results will in all likely hood eventually start converging more recognisably on art-images as Google continuously fine-tune and improve their algorithms – Nathaniel is better in informed about this than myself – N, what do you think – am I making sense here? ( if we take one such snapshot a month we’ll have a 15second movie (at 15fps) in say 3 years, how is your patience?
D, I want thank you specifically again for the input in our processes – its great – and rare – to be able to soundboard things like this with someone of your perspectives. As much as I enjoy exploring conceptual ambiguity, notions of indistinct boundaries etc, I do want to create stuff that can be shared and meaningfully (and ideally pasionately) engaged with by others, as I know N does also.