Files, folders, dirs, disks, piles, heaps; great yawning data mines and camera-provided context (this year, this date, this time, this number in sequence) sometimes show themselves telling; every so often a new thought, a new technique, a new programmatic approach will yield something interesting from great yawning memory.
With off-the-shelf software I’ve found a way to abuse old images into something representative; something a little more memorial. Each of the following images is a composite of three or more, comprised of all of the same subject(s), or better, completely different places and times, spanning seconds, minutes, hours, days; miles, blocks, feet, and inches. Like memory they tend to conflate, mashing faces, places, and spaces into single images.
It’s not only an average or a composite, though. Many of the images are possible because there was a corpus of pictures with similar-enough subject matter. If I took, for example, dozens of shots of a certain power substation at different times, from different perspectives, the image is wider, denser, and probably has more errors. You can read the density and width of these images as indicators of interest in a subject.
All of these photos represent a certain span of time, from 2001 until 2005; a certain singular college experience, a certain sculptural program, a certain fixation. The process of taking masses of photos, over four years, using four different cameras yielded the different color saturations, depths of field, and misaligned geometry you can see here. I won’t call this data analysis, it’s not; plenty of it is fully faked. This is how I remember things.