Aggregates

Aggregates is an exploration of the materiality of digital photography. I started with the idea that we experience photography through digital screens and those screens all have a discrete set of colors and pixels. I wrote software to take a screen size and number of colors and generate every possible combination. The video below shows this software running as it iterates every combination of five colors in a two by two grid.

I then take all of those combinations and print them out as an index of all the combinations. I had to write custom software to make the index as most commercial software can't handle hundreds of thousands of jpegs in a single folder.

I fold the paper to introduce light and shadow to the grid and photograph it, interrupting the rational and computational with the subjective. I then repeat this process several times. These works have been shown nationally and internationally, and are in the permanent collection of several museums, including The Guggenheim in NYC, and LACMA in Los Angeles.