each standing clear, without any confusion or blending…”
<The Aleph>, Jorge Luis Borges
Autum
© Shinseungback Kimyonghun
Photographs are a source of realistic and symbolic information about the world. A number of artists including John Baldessari, Hans-Peter Feldmann and Joachim Schmid have explored social and cultural collectivity through found photographs since the late 1960s. The accessibility and materiality of photographs on the Web bring new possibilities to such a practice. Billions of annotated photographs taken from around the world are readily accessible, and the images can be automatically analysed and synthesized beyond physical limitations. The web photo archive provides a foundation to explore the world from a new perspective.
‘A Million Seasons’ attempts to visualize each season with a million photos collected from the web. A season is an abstract concept in flux. White cherry blossoms in the street, a lady in pink skirts, yellow leaves on sprouts… Spring is differently experienced and recorded in different time and space. This work gathers up the world’s imageries of the season to describe the ‘image of Spring’. A million Flickr photos tagged ‘spring’ are crawled, and each photo is turned into one pixel with an average color. The one million pixels from one million photos represent Spring. The images of the rest of the seasons are created the same way.
About: Shinseungback Kimyonghun
Shinseungback Kimyonghun is a Seoul based artist group consisting of Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun. Their collaborative practice explores expanding area of imaging and vision using image processing and computer vision.
Shin Seung Back(b. 1979) studied Computer Science in Yonsei University and Kim Yong Hun(b. 1980) completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts in the Photomedia studio at SCA, The University of Sydney. Their collaboration began when they were in the same laboratory for their postgraduate studies in GSCT, KAIST. After completing a Master of Science and Engineering, they started to work as a team, Shinseungback Kimyonghun, in 2012.
Project webpage A Million Seasons
Artist website