exploring the image and story chains
18 May
James Craig just sent me a link this morning to a fascinating Shockwave artwork in which you can navigate through images by zooming into one picture which has colors that are comprised of other pictures which in turn you can delve deeper into. It’s mesmerising, and it would take a very long time to explore it before you could see all the images.
This reminded me a lot of Chuck Close‘s paintings. I’m not sure if it was he who did the original images that were made up of smaller images and which were so popular in the early nineties, or if that was someone else.
It also reminded me of two literary works by Julio Cortázar. The first was the short story called “Blow-Up” (which inspired the 1966 film by Antonioni even though the two are very different) in which the photographer protagonist discovers a hidden story by seeing the details in a blown-up picture he casually took. The second work is his masterpiece Hopscotch which is an open-ended anti-novel that is composed of a bunch of short chapters which can be read in various orders to create a vast number of possible stories. Nifty indeed.