122 - Chicago Sunday Morning

122 - Chicago Sunday Morning
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Ania has gone to Chicago for a couple of weeks to teach teachers how to teach Polish better. As a consequence we use Skype to keep in contact, and I took several snapshots from her webcam output. What I did not realize at the time was that the images were only some 320 pixels wide.

Is a problem really a problem, or is it an opportunity? I think problems are opportunities, but only if the way you think is to create new ideas rather than apply tradition. Problems are generally where the situation does not fit the current system, and the current system was designed in the past and is therefore a tradition. If we knew something was going to happen, it cannot be a problem as we already knew that the system was not able to cope with the predicted event and failed to redesign the system, whatever that might be and for whatever reason.

I expanded the picture so that it was 4000 pixels wide, and this meant that I had to edit all the picture to remove the blurriness. As I mentioned in a previous post, all I really need is the composition and some kind of consistent lighting, and this is maintained no matter how big the picture is made. Of course, I made a couple of poor decisions because I had not attempted this kind of expansion before, so I do not feel bad about them.

I used essentially the same techniques as I had for the earlier black and white images, although the effect is less apparent until you zoom into the image. If you do you will see it rather resembles an oil painting, and I wondered whether people would see this as a good, bad irrelevant thing.

Since I view art as being the having of ideas, I am not particularly interested in how something should be classified other than as a convenient way of talking about it that conveys something about the actual physical material (well, electronic material in this case, until I print it).

So, I have a photograph that resembles an oil painting with the two-dimensionality of a watercolor. I also pushed the pixels around the image much as one would do with a brush, spatula or fingers. In this way it seems to have invaded the arena of painting.

In painting there is a technique known as pointillism, where a small palette of primary type colors are applied to the canvas as dots of each color. Here painting is invading the arena of digital photography, although devised about a century previously.

The world is not digital, it is analogue, that is all classes blend into all others. We simply impose classes on the random potential of what could be to make communication simpler. We say a particular kind of object is a 'table' because our brains are able to classify, not because it is good for innovation.