Visualising Time and Representation

The growing proliferation of digital photographs that are now being produced has given rise to a variety of enquiry, both practice and theory based, into the ubiquitous nature of the image and its status as a cultural artefact. The practice of combing multiple photographs to communicate some insight beyond that of the discreet image is found in contemporary art practice, with many approaches remediating historical techniques of depicting multiple instances within a single frame.

In contrast to this practice, which retains the indexical intent of ‘traditional’ photography, the work of Lev Manovich’s Cultural Analytics Lab uses large image data sets, mined from sources such as social media, to create visualisations that attempt to analyse patterns in the aesthetic makeup of images and nature of the photographs as cultural artefacts.

3 visualisations of images from UN Environment Programme to represent the climate in the context of disasters and conflicts since 2013.

Manovich uses several techniques in his studies, more recently relying on metadata (such as gps data) as well as algorithmic analysis of individual images to construct his visualisations. Earlier studies created by the Cultural Analytics Lab however, use bespoke software to either arrange images chronologically into to grid mosaics or apply algorithmic analysis of the shapes, hue and saturation to then visualise the image-datasets according to the authors specified parameters.

The project Visualising Time and Representation utilises these methods to create mosaics that explore image collections that represent specific periods of time and global events. The works use publicly available images used by political institutions to depict themselves. The aim is to analyse the image as a means of representation and examine the use of the photograph to perpetuate a banal, standardised view of the world.

Visualisations of the official image output from the political terms of the UK coalition government (L) and Obamas two terms in office (R)

In contrast to the political collections, one visualisation is taken from a project carried out with private individuals and aims to present the concept that the vernacular may be more insightful than the ‘professional’. Formalistic rectangular montages, whilst serving as visualisations of specific periods, also represent the constraints of the apparatus of the digital image, particularly the thumbnail and the grid. Other methods have therefor been used to break up the formal structure of these collections to ask if through visualising them based on computational analysis of the images algorithmic structure, alternative perspectives on the content of these collections can be derived. This should be done through focusing on small sections of the larger visualisation, thereby examining if insight can be gained through the juxtaposition of images, the intention being to identify the a-typical amongst a plethora of similar images.

Visualisations of images taken over a six week period by members of a Palestinian community as part of a participatory photography workshop.