100 Images: Boxes for Chaos

Chaos is not the problem, but rather, a cause for relief. The real challenge here is managing the competing strains of semi-sense, and facing the obligation of disentangling intertwined categorical designations. Spreading all the relevant documents before me, I can see I will need to generate a series of boxes with words and names scribbled on them. I’ll need tags.

Result of Preliminary Brainstorming:

• art in image = painting

• art in image = photograph
• art in image = sculpture
• colour = 0
• colour = 1
• figure skater
• grid pattern
• highway overpass
• institution
• living humans in image = 0
• living humans in image = 1
• living humans in image = 1+
• passport photo
• party
• preserved or archival (apparently)
• photographer
• Stephen Harper
• wood stack
• space = interior

• space = exterior
• representation = contextual
• representation = reproduction

This list stands as inadequate. I continued to increase the minimum number of attributes any picture must have, from 3 to 4 to 5, and further, each time fracturing the body of images into smaller and more precise groups.

I hesitate before moving into tags so specific that they exist simply to differentiate one image from another extremely similar image based on some subtle minuta. It will take further exploration and creativity to refine the list into only the most useful and essential categories.

100 Images: Into The Wilderness

I let the wilderness of images overwhelm me. Sporadic associations, implicit patterns, and unwilled theories arise spontaneously, all without names. I struggle to see everything and know nothing. As always, my trust lies with the great power of the unconscious to reveal the latent truth of the world to me without the perversion of undue preconception.

I cannot name that which I do not know, and surely, vice versa.

The urge to order is too great to resist. The spell of naivety dissolves. As quickly as I’m struck by the distinct similarity of certain groups of images I’m compelled to find ways to fracture these groups along different algorithms. I anticipate obvious patterns and immediately jump toward disrupting them. The simple truth of the associations between figure skaters and photographers, institution interiors and highway overpasses, will need to be tempered by means to render them distinct.

I immediately extrapolate all kinds of mechanisms for disruption. What alternative systems of classification can be brought to bear upon these images that would separate articles ostensibly so alike at first glance? What kind of countervailing operation could offer a new way of seeing beyond commonsense impulses to easy generalization? Should I just give in and embrace Occam’s razor, placing those images which seem so obviously similar into the same group? Both impulses should be accommodated by any good solution.

Strategies for navigating the archive should discover a balance between embracing and challenging the prevailing commonsense.