Photo Mosaics That Show Just How Much Internet Reproductions “Lie”
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are scientists by trade and artists at heart. They work as the leads of a Google research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and are constantly on the lookout for interesting (and artistic) ways to visualize data.
Back in 2011, they came up with an interesting project titled “The Art Of Reproduction,” which shows how digital reproductions of photographs (and paintings) found on the Internet are far from “truthful.”
The goal of the investigation was to see “how far reproductions stray from each other.” The found that there are indeed big differences between multiple copies of the same photograph uploaded online.
The duo created the first piece at the top using the photograph “D14” by Man Ray. A quick Google search confirms that there are indeed drastically different versions of this photograph online:
Viégas and Wattenberg also did the same thing with the photograph “Ken Moody and Robert Sherman” by Mapplethorpe:
“Note the slight deviations from pure grayscale,” the duo writes. Through the project, they found that photographs are displayed online with dozens of different palettes, with various crops, with various textures and frames, and different distortions. All of these inaccuracies in reproduction help form a “tapestry of beautiful half-truths.”
Check out the entire The Art Of Reproduction gallery to see this same thing done for a number of other artworks (the two we featured here are the only photography-related ones in the collection, though).
The Art Of Reproduction [HINT.FM via TOP]
Image credits: Photo collages by Fernanda Viégas/Martin Wattenberg/HINT.FM
