Marvin’s Heiferman and what Photography means to me…

The tool of the photograph, the power to mediate time and image to make something that appears definitive but is ultimately false. It is the raw power of these things to manipulate perception and augment our experiences that I find most fascinating. The Datification of images is an interesting perspective expressed in Heiferman’s essay, how something that was once valued mostly for artistic expression is now commodified as proof, evidence and traded as it’s own sort of currency in our modern world. I have found in my own works and research that realizing this about our photographs, about the data contained within and around the image there is an entirely new method of aesthetic presentation – while there is an image of a street view camera embedded in the Essay it only manages to scratch the surface when it comes to the potential impact of gathering images in such a way.

There is metadata, secret information hidden in each image just waiting to be processed – interpolated as an entirely new form of art. Each face could become a fiducial, capable of being recognized by the machine and expressed as points in numerous dimensions and the geometry of shapes, buildings and other features captured by the camera’s all seeing eye can be parsed in an unlimited number of abstract ways.

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