by Jessie Roberts
Kyle Vanhemert crafted a photo essay from screenshots of Jeffrey Martin’s 150-gigapixel panorama of Toyko:
[I]n an image this large, where so much physical space is captured in such high resolution, there’s also, inevitably, art. Or at least fragments that are artful. It’s a little bit like a photographic version of the infinite monkeys theorem. Photograph so much life, and some of it’s bound to be evocative, in one way or another. So, on a recent afternoon, I spent three hours immersed in this frozen metropolis, searching not for sordid happenings but for those scattered bits of beauty. …
On a basic level, mine was an exercise in curation. I clicked and dragged this truly massive image across my laptop screen until something interesting wound up inside of its borders. I took screenshots of things that I would have taken photographs of had I been there in person–compositions that piqued my aesthetic interest, for one reason or another. Coming out of my three-hour Tokyo excursion was strange and disorienting–some unique virtual variety of jet lag. But the folder of screenshots I ended up with was even stranger. Did I take these photographs? Did Jeffrey Martin? Are they photographs at all? Are any of them worth a damn?
He concludes by noting that “estimates put the number of pictures being generated everyday above a billion” and that “as that number grows, finding signal amidst all that noise will inevitably become a more viable artistic pursuit.”
(Photo: Jeffrey Martin via Kyle Vanhemert)
The Dish 