Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Hello, my name is Balázs, I am a photographer from Budapest and I will be guest-blogging this week. Many thanks for the opportunity to the team of Der Greif! During my work I find quite oftenly that I'm very much interested in the process itself of how an image is made. Thinking of this, I thought I'd like to start by sharing a deeply thought-provoking conceptual work, Every Icon by John F. Simon, Jr. which he launched on the 14th of January, 1997, at 9:00:00 PM. Simon writes in his Artist Statement: "Can a machine produce every possible image? What are the limits of this kind of automation? Is it possible to practice image making by exploring all of image-space using a computer rather than by recording from the world around us? What does it mean that one may discover visual imagery so detached from "nature"? Every Icon progresses by counting. Starting with an image where every grid element is white, the software displays combinations of black and white elements, proceeding toward an image where every element is black. In contrast to presenting a single image as an intentional sign, Every Icon presents all possibilities." In 1997 Simon's program started to explore all the possible combinations of black and white pixels that could be displayed within the 32 x 32 grid, starting from the top left corner. If we imagine this grid of 1024 pixels as, for instance, the LCD screen of a very early digital camera, we can realize that by time, it will inevitably display a super low-quality black and white image of every moment that has ever happened and not happened in the past, everything that will once happen or what could but will never happen, even everything that is happening right at this moment (me typing this text). Every photograph that was ever taken and all those that will once be taken in the future. However: "... at a rate of 100 icons per second (on a typical desktop computer), it will take only 1.36 years to display all variations of the first line of the grid, the second line takes an exponentially longer 5.85 billion years to complete." - writes Simon in the Artist Statement. Then he adds: "While Every Icon is resolved conceptually, it is unresolvable in practice. In some ways the theoretical possibilities outdistance the time scales of both evolution and imagination. It posits a representational system where computational promise is intricately linked to extraordinary duration and momentary sensation." Check Every Icon here.