the last place on earth you probably want to be

Walter Benjamin, the icon of any good art education, and the bane of many an art student’s existence, wrote a seminal essay in 1936 entitled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The essay deals primarily with how authorship, authenticity and accuracy figure in a world where things can be easily mutliplied using technological means. Any generation alive today has grown up the age of mechanical reproduction–photography, lithography, offset and digital printing, the internet–and virtually all of visual communications are produced using one or more of these methods. The gap between artist and audience is continually widening, to the point where it is sometimes even surprising to learn that a human being had a hand in the creation of a commercial advertisement, or even in the manufacturing of an automobile.

One of the things that interests me about reproduction is the way information is distributed on the internet. Let’s say a book about an artist is published. The page of the book that features an artwork is a third generation copy–the first is the original, and the second is the photograph taken of the artwork, which is then printed. Provided that the same printer, paper and inks were used to publish the books, if 10,000 people see the book, each one of those people views the same third generation copy of the original work.

The internet, on the other hand, distributes third generation copies of an innumerable quantity of originals. But what makes the internet so complex is that every single user experiences this third generation copy in a different way, essentially making it a fourth generation copy (third generation=someone posting it online; fourth generation=someone viewing it online on a different device). Screen resolution, physical monitor composition, colour calibration–all of these things change the way visual information is consumed.

Because of the pervasive qualities of the internet, how many of us rely on it (before books, before museums) to obtain visual information, such as looking up a specific image? It is fast, easy, and reliable. But is it truly reliable?

Google Image Search is a tool that is particularly useful to demonstrate what I mean. Picasso’s 1937 Guernica is a famous painting that is held by the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. It is painted only in black and white. If you do a Google Image Search for “picasso guernica“, you see a surprising variation of hue–the thumbnails appear blue, green, brown, purple–and in fact not a single one appears to be a true black and white.

I wanted to explore how Google would present basic colour information to me. I wanted to use Google Image Search to see how things like “orange,” “cerulean blue,” and “grass green” would be interpreted. I was particularly interested in colours like “orange” due its various meanings in the English language.

I made a screen capture of the results (but not of the surrounding window) and went through two generations of resizing–one reduction, and then one enlargement, to produce a non-mathematical, unscientific “average” of the results Google Image Search gave me.

Here is how Google Image Search interprets colour:

Magenta

Orange

Grass Green

Cerulean Blue

Indigo

What interests me about this particular exploration is that each person viewing these images will have a different degree of inaccuracy. While the viewing takes place on the same generation of copy, the variables that allow for different experience are so innumerable that the same generation can in fact have millions of versions.

I am exploring more ways to aggregate the colour data to produce different results. I like that these look like colour field paintings–printing them and hanging them in a gallery would be particularly funny to me.

Anyway, I might post more of these as my brain wraps around the idea a bit more.

_________