Breaking Pictures - Billboards 2

Somewhere in this mess of ripped billboards there lies a hidden message. The layers of time worn away to reveal something secret. Maybe.

 

Photographic Reality

"We constantly tend to misuse or misunderstand the term reality in relation to photographs. The photograph itself is the only thing that is real".

Robert Heinecken

 

Pixel Feedback

Been thinking about the digital world we live in. Every time I get on the train I look around and see practically every person engaging in some way with their phone: listening to music, playing games, checking email, some even make phone calls. And I'm just the same - that little screen demanding my attention. FOMO - Fear of missing out (Could your FOMO Kill you?) The challenge is stay in the present moment. 

Anyways, it got me thinking about digital information and how it's brought to us. I know it's ones and zeros at some level but I still can't get my head around how all the information is stored inside the device. I have to imagine billions of minuscule ones and zeros all in a tiny container. How can I be so close to technology but have no real idea how it works? You try and look inside but there's really nothing to see. 

I found one way to illustrate this idea, to take a USB microscope and to record in close up detail the computer screen itself. No image as such but just the screen pixels. And what's it looking at? Well, itself - the screen image of the output of the microscope looking at what the screen output of the microscope is looking at. A nice feedback loop. I used to do this with video cameras back in the 1980s by pointing the camera at the monitor output for the camera - an easy psychedelic effect.

Here's some examples:

  See more of my work at www.marktamer.co.uk

Breaking Pictures - Deliberate Glitches 2

Continuing on from my attempts to deliberately break or glitch images I've been looking at how digital files are downloaded and what happens when some of the data is missing. Torrent sites host illegal downloads of movies, software, music etc and the idea is that when users have downloaded a file they then "seed" this to other users. Each seed offers smaller parts of the whole file and each part comes from a different computer in a different part of the world. It's all part of the ever increasing deluge of data pinging around us at all times.

It's an interesting idea that one file, or more specifically one image could be made up of smaller parts from anywhere in the world. Of course, when you look at the image it is identical to any other digital version of the same image. So in order to highlight this process, I thought I would try downloading ("leeching" in torrent terms) a series of images and then halting the process half-way through - when there is enough information to open the image but but not enough to complete it. 

The result is something like this:

 

Being a torrent site most of the images available were pornography. My interests aren't necessarily in the  rights and wrongs of this, but with what makes the image in the first place. The stuff under the hood. I settled for a folder of images of women with at least some clothes on. I think the glitches make the final image more suggestive than the original.

 

I then took this one stage further and added some additional code glitches (see previous post for more on this) just to finalise the image. 

  See more of my work at www.marktamer.co.uk

Breaking Pictures - Deliberate Glitches

I've been manipulating the inner workings of images for a while. Essentially, it's a digital image that I have opened up in a hex editor, changed the code around and then resaved. For these portraits I thought it would interesting to add something personal from the sitters. So, after I'd photographed each person and loaded the image onto the laptop, I asked them to name a favourite song. I then cut and pasted the lyrics from their song straight into the code. Resaving the file then causes the image to "break." the results are quite unpredictable, which is part of the appeal. 

 

This is what the code looks like using a hex editor.

 

See more of my work at www.marktamer.co.uk

Breaking Pictures - Billboards

I've been photographing the billboard near my house for about four years. Every week a new advertising message arrives and by the end of the week the wind and rain have taken their toll. Sometimes it's just a small tear, other times the whole thing drops off and leaves an interesting mish-mash of old messages. 

It's a bit like London - lots of layers on top of one another, the past is never far away and always mixing with the present.

There's a project here, I just haven't found a way into it as yet. In the meantime I'll keep collecting images.

 

Old Stories for New Times: inspiration for sustainable living

I took part in a lovely project last year that is now nearing it's finish point - at least for now. 

The exhibition is dedicated to day-to-day life and community life in Kilburn, Kensal Green, Brondesbury and Mapesbury in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s before cheap oil and consumerism took the world by storm.

There's a piece here from Rob Hopkins from the Transition Network who was kind enough to do a talk at the exhibition. 

Iain and below Norman took part in the project.