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ATLAS is a series of triptychs made from images found on the Internet between 2015-2019. The triptychs are created using content-based-image-retrieval (CBIR) search engines like Google's search-by-image. The text is sourced from the original context of each image, though many of the captions have become garbled by automated translation. CBIR is one of the fastest growing fields in computer science focused on the development of computer vision, pattern recognition and machine-learning algorithms. While it is usually used to search and identify, this project harnesses the creative potential of computer vision to confuse images and reveal arbitrary correspondences in form.
The Atlas project has also been exhibited in video form, but due to its being restricted by Youtube is not available at the moment for online preview. In the video version of this work, music is borrowed from an arrangement by Hirokazu Tanaka of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker Suite for the 1989 Nintendo Entertainment System version of the popular video game Tetris. Originally developed by Alexey Pajitnov in connection with machine learning and AI research conducted in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, the game’s subsequent publishing and marketing is a checkered history of unauthorized licensing and copying. Generally ranked among the greatest video games of all time, a recent study suggests that the game could have a further therapeutic effect in helping prevent flashbacks after viewing traumatic material.