This work documents seven data centers dotted across the Pacific Northwest operated by Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. It highlights the usurping of the camera by data centers: in each of these photographs the data centers graphically take the camera’s traditional place at the top of a tripod. As a series these photographs investigate the shifting landscape of images that is moving away from analog photography, and is moving towards a precedence of “network images” in image-making.

Network images are a form of computational photography in which the pre- or post-processing of digital image media takes place in distributed…

Latour, a philosopher, writes in the essay Some Experiments in Art and Politics, “…networks have no inside, only radiating connectors. They are all edges. They provide connections but no structure. One does not reside in a network, but rather moves to other points along the edges.”

The understanding of network as a mere nested series of smaller structures is old and outdated, for Latour. As he points out, it is rooted in a Renaissance prescription of the hierarchy of the universe known as scala naturae, which lays the ground for modernism, a movement which Latour is highly skeptical of. The…

“Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.” Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb

Data exhaust are the footprints you leave behind as you go about your digital life.

Every action you take on a digital device is a footstep recorded in the sands of the metaverse. If you peruse the web, if you paint a canvas in Photoshop, if you open an app on your computer, you are generating many kinds of data exhaust: web cookies, image caches, and system logs. These files are the…

New media art includes all art made on computer programs, new technical instruments, and that which employs concepts such as “data” and “information”. That’s my definition for now.

Within new media art there might be two camps, two sub-styles. One camp leans hard into the “newness” effect of new media. Artists in this camp create artworks which experiment with unique forms of overlapping colors, high-frequency oscillation, geometric complexity, and much more. They use newly developed tools and repurpose them to create stuff that the makers of the tool did not necessarily intend. This camp revels in the surprise gifts uncovered…

This is an edited re-write of my original essay Ingenic and Exgenic Media. Thank you to Andrew Schwartz for editing the piece. This essay will be published on https://mangoprism.com/ later this month.

In 2019, Jak Wilmot livestreamed himself living a week in virtual reality. He ate with a VR headset on and didn’t take it off to sleep or to go to the restroom. When he showered he kept his eyes closed. …

Below is the introduction found at the start of the book.

Phil Kikawa is an avid modder of Skyrim, the open world RPG video game. He has added dozens of modifications to the game’s runtime code to make it look spectacular, in both life-like photorealistic ways, and in ways that are abstractly idyllic.

These images are of a genre I call “screenscapes.” This style of photography treats the screen not as a flat canvas but as a landscape with depth. It is a type of photography that requires deep meditation and mediation into the complexities and beauty of a…

Browse through an IKEA catalog and you’ll see a spread of pristine kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms, each cast with a warm blanket of sunlight. Stools, ottomans, and floor lamps rest stoically in the corner, and silverware sits perfectly knolled in drawers. The mise en scène is spotless.

These images are spotless perhaps because they are not photographs of real places. They are actually 3D renderings of virtual homes, entirely composed of bits and bytes. In 2005 IKEA snuck in its first 3D rendering of their chair “Bertil” into the catalog. No one noticed. By 2014, it was not just…

This realtime face-tracked filter enumerates a wide range of computational photography techniques that work behind the scenes to make face-tracked filters like this even possible. Computational photography is the object of analysis in this piece, through which I hope to illuminate how images are becoming increasingly processed by computers and further entwined with complex information systems.

The types of computational photography techniques listed range from simple image stacking, to AI-generating, 3D rendering, and image compressing, as well as techniques that utilize special hardware for multispectral capture, microscopic capture (such as protein imaging) and telescopic capture (such as deep astronomical imaging).

…