Automated Digital Photo Collages: Automated Digital Photo Collage of View South from Columbus Circle, 2/2022

This is one part of a pair of images generated of the view looking downtown in New York City from Columbus Circle. The Automated Digital Photo Collage (ADPC) is an artwork that is built using a custom algorithm (written in Python) running on a portable, low power computer (currently a Raspberry Pi 3), and a camera (currently a Canon Eos 5-D). I set up the computer, screen and camera on a tripod in places that I find significant and stand there for a period of time varying from 10-30 minutes and trigger a series of images. The ADPC compares each one to a baseline image and adds what it detects as different into an aggregation, a time lapse-collage. The result displayed as it is generated, allowing for interactivity.

The contemporary global digital culture, with its ephemeral images on glowing screens, has fractured previous realities. Our sense of self, community and cultural identity are increasingly dependent on the digital presentations we create. This uneasy relationship we sense with the ephemeral nature of bits and our dependence on evolving hardware to retrieve this growing portion of ourselves is a new tension our culture is experiencing. The ADPC visualizes the passage of time through an additive process that overwrites and alters the legibility of the image to simultaneously hold impressions of many moments and obscure details just like human memory.