Camera Reversa | 2015
When you press the shutter of Camera Reversa, you effectively take two images: one that you saw, and one “seen” via a content-based image retrieval (CBIR), or reverse image search, that uses various algorithms to match the input image with visually or semantically similar output images, which are drawn from Google’s image database.
This generative photographic process questions traditional notions of intention, authorship, and subject. What are the implications of engaging in a photographic relationship with the world, not to render your embodied environment, but to operationalize the attributes of that environment as search queries to explore a given image database? Aesthetic characteristics such as composition, lighting, focal length, and depth of field all have stakes within the photographic act – not in a singular direction, but within overlapping fields of weighted probabilities, as visual attributes compete, intersect, and intermingle with semantic objects.
Exhibits:
3459, Flux Factory in New York City and Tom’s Etching Studio in London, 2016
INTERVENTIONS, Pearl Conard Gallery, Mansfield, OH, 2015
Docu{rithm}, Power Plant Gallery, Durham, NC, 2015
Docu{rithm}, Keohane-Kenan Gallery, Durham, NC, 2015
Docu{rithm}, La Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá, Bogotá, Colombia, 2015
Copyright © 2015 Aaron Kutnick. All rights reserved.