digital photo recycler thesis

8/2/2019 Digital Photo Recycler Thesis

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The Digital Photo Recycler:What Could We Be Doing With All This Data?

Joseph Evans

Master of Science

(Design and Digital Media)Edinburgh College of ArtThe University of Edinburgh 2011


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Abstract

This thesis, in conjunction with The Digital Photo Recycler1 , was created during the Summer

of 2011 to highlight a growing problem in the digital age. To put it bluntly, we are creating too

much data.

Through a discussion of the various concepts and ideas ranging from: the recycling movement,

what we do with unwanted data and what we could do with it, what counts as good and bad

in art, the open source movement and crowd sourcing. It aims to provide, not a solution to

a problem, but contextualise the creation of a new collaborative artistic tool aimed at raising

awareness of it.

1The live version of this website can be viewed atjoepevans.com/recycler/recycler, a version is also included inthe accompanying DVD
http://www.joepevans.com/recyclerhttp://-/?-http://www.joepevans.com/recycler


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Contents

1 Description 6

2 Introduction 9

3 Impetus 113.1 Have I Got Too Much Data? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3.1.1 More and More and More Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123.1.2 Personal Unwanted Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133.1.3 How to Decide if Something is Worth Keeping? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3.2 Reduce, Reuse and Recycling the Digital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143.3 Narrowing Down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

3.3.1 The Death and Life of net.art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153.4 What Can We Do With All This Data? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

4 Conceptual Development 174.1 Original Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

4.1.1 Problems With This Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184.2 Goodness and Badness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194.2.1 Good and Bad Art, Beauty and Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194.2.2 Good and Bad in Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

4.3 Artistic Recycling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244.4 Revised Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

5 Creating The Digital Photo Recycler 275.1 Making the Recycler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

5.1.1 Choosing Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295.1.2 Filters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

5.2 The Wisdom of Crowds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315.3 Prototyping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

5.3.1 Moving Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335.3.2 Release Early, Release Often . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355.3.3 Removing Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

5.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385.5 Average Use of the Site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395.6 The Recycler as a Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395.7 Taking It Further . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

1


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CONTENTS CONTENTS

6 Conclusion 43

A First Appendix: User Input 44

A.1 Blog Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44A.2 Recycler:Comments Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45A.3 Other Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

A.3.1 From Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

B Filters and Processing.js Code 48B.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48B.2 setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48B.3 Filters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

B.3.1 Simple Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50B.3.2 Alternation Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54B.3.3 Colour Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56B.3.4 Rearranging Pixels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

B.3.5 Rearranging the Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65B.3.6 Artistic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Last edited : August 18, 2011


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List of Figures

3.1 Screenshot of http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/betalab/index.html (1996) . . . . . 15

4.1 Ebbets, Charles C: Lunch atop a Skyscraper(1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

4.2 Da Vinci, Leonardo: The Mona Lisa (1503 to 1505) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184.3 Chilean Miners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214.4 UnrealDiscords best photo of 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214.5 The Pale Blue Dot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224.6 An uploaded photo which I think is good. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234.7 Duchamp, Marcel: Fountain(1917) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244.8 Mondrian, Piet: Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red (1937-42) . . . . . . . . . . 244.9 B+: Cover Art for Entroducing by DJ Shadow (1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

5.1 Early Example of Filter Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305.2 The Digital Photo Recycler v0.0.3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325.3 The Digital Photo Recycler v0.3.3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365.4 Responses through blog, website and Facebook for the Digital Photo Recycler . 37

5.5 A bad generated image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385.6 Checker: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395.7 Checker: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395.8 The Evolution of a Single Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405.9 Generated Seascape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415.10 Concattonated Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415.11 Reintegrated Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415.12 Splitting Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

B.1 Inverted Photograph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51B.2 Grayscale: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51B.3 Posterize: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

B.4 Blurred: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52B.5 Blurred: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52B.6 Posterize: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52B.7 Posterize: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52B.8 Added Photographs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53B.9 Checker: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54B.10 Checker: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54B.11 Alternate: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55B.12 Alternate: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

3


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LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF FIGURES

B.13 Flipped: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56B.14 Flipped: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56B.15 Spit Colour 1: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

B.16 Spit Colour 1: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57B.17 Spit Colour 2: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57B.18 Spit Colour 2: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57B.19 Spit Colour 3: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58B.20 Spit Colour 3: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58B.21 Spit Colour 4: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58B.22 Spit Colour 4: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58B.23 Filter By Red: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60B.24 Filter By Red: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60B.25 Filter By Green: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61B.26 Filter By Green: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61B.27 Filter By Blue: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61B.28 Filter By Blue: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61B.29 Random: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62B.30 Random: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62B.31 Sorted Photograph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64B.32 Rotate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65B.33 Random Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66B.34 4 Way Kaleidoscope: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67B.35 4 Way Kaleidoscope: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67B.36 8 Way Kaleidoscope: Level 1 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68B.37 8 Way Kaleidoscope: Level 12 Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68B.38 Mondrian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70



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LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF FIGURES

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the help of a whole range of people,

including:

Mhairi Wilson: Who can keep me sane even when shes in another country. Paul Grapefruit

McLelland: Chief Legal Adviser and Bug Checker; My supervisor: Jules Rawlinson; Miriam

Evans: The top of the power distribution curve; Anyone who has ever posted on a PHP,

MySQL or Processing Forum; FoodCare SP: Stimulating the way through our summer; Rebecca

Black:Official day notifier; Ola Lvholm: Rebecca Blacks number 1 fan; Brendan F Doyle: DVD

printer to the stars; The Whole Taking Over The Cavaedium crew;

And most importantly anyone who posted comments, spoke to me in person or most impor-

tantly used The DIgital Photo Recycler. The below message is for you.



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Chapter 1

Project Contents

This submission consist of this essay and The Digital Photo Recycler1: A collaborative web

based manipulation photo tool in which unwanted bad photographs can be collected, shared,

and adapted by other users, and then reintroduced back into the internet as good im-

ages.

The DVD accompanying this essay contains:

A full working version of the Digital Photo Recycler: This contains all of the code, pho-

tographs and images it contained at the time of submission. This is housed within

a folder titled digital_photo_recycler_web in the root folder of the dvd. In this file,

there is a file named joepevan_recycle.sql and two folders named MAMP and digi-

tal_photo_recycler_site. Below are instructions for setting up the website:

Mac users with MAMP installed: If you already have MAMP installed on your

computer, firstly copy the folder named digital_photo_recycler_site into the ht-

docs folder within your MAMP application. Then launch MAMP and click open

start window . Go to the phpMyadmin tab in the start window and im-

port joepevan_recycle.sql. The site should now be up and running. Go to

http://localhost:8888/digital_photo_recycler_site/to test and use the site.

1The live version of this website can be viewed at joepevans.com/recycler/recycler

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http://www.joepevans.com/recyclerhttp://localhost:8888/digital_photo_recycler_site/http://-/?-http://www.joepevans.com/recycler


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CHAPTER 1. DESCRIPTION

Mac users without MAMP installed: If you do not have MAMP installed on your com-

puter, MAMP (Mac, Apache, mySql, PHP) is an environment which allows dynamic

websites to be run directly on your computer without connection to the internet.

To run this and view the website, first install MAMP by copying the MAMP folder to

your applications folder. After going through MAMPs install procedures, everything

should be set up to launch the website. Then launch MAMP and once lights have

turned green, click open start window. Your browser should now open and you

should see a webpage saying Welcome to MAMP If you can see this page, MAMP

is installed on your Mac and everything is working. The site should now be up and

running. Go to http://localhost:8888/digital_photo_recycler_site/ to test and use

the site.

PC users: If you are a PC user you should be able to follow a similar process using

WAMP2 (Mac, Apache, mySql, PHP). Either download WAMP if you do not have it or

copy the digital_photo_recycler_site folder into the WAMP www folder and import

joepevan_recycle.sql into phpMyadmin. Go to

http://localhost/digital_photo_recycler_site/to test the site.

A video titled walkthrough.mov. This video shows a screen capture displaying the basicfunctionality of the site and some of the ways in which it can be used.

A very brief video titled images.mov. This is a quickly made visualisation of all the

images created by the Digital Photo Recycler. It was originally planned to be included

within the website, but an adequate place for it has not been found. It is intended as a

quick visual way of showing the wealth of images passed through the recycler and a

way of appreciating how images link to each other and change over time. Please be

ware that this video is a series of flashing images and it is not advisable to watch if you

are affected by strobe lighting.

A pdf of this essay. This is titled digital_photo_recycler_j_evans_thesis.pdf and can be

found in the root folder of the dvd.2http://www.wampserver.com/en/

http://localhost/digital_photo_recycler_site/http://-/?-http://www.wampserver.com/en/http://localhost:8888/digital_photo_recycler_site/


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CHAPTER 1. DESCRIPTION

Before reading the document it would be advisable to spend a short amount of time exploring

the website to get an idea of some of its key functions and to see some of the outcomes

which have been produced with it. For best results and to be sure to see the site the way it is

intended, please use Google Chrome. If you do not use Chrome, please use Safari or Firefox

but beware some styling may not work properly.

This document covers the thoughts, ideas and processes that led to the creation and devel-

opment of The Digital Photo Recycler, explaining the incorporation of a multitude of influences

ranging from artistic theory to the open source movement. It is not intended to be a tech-

nical document charting the specifications and minutea involved in creating a website of this

sort, not a timeline of the events that led to it creation, instead a companion piece providingcontextualisation for the site and expanding on a number of ideas which may only be hinted

at in the site itself.. Some key technical aspects are mentioned but I have attempted to keep

them brief and discuss such issues in broad terms. For those interested in the technical side of

the project, more information has been included in The Appendix (6) and also on the website

itself.



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Chapter 2

Introduction: The Digital Photo

Recycler

Making Bad Photos Good

The Digital Photo Recycler, is A collaborative web based manipulation photo tool in which

unwanted bad photographs can be collected, shared, and adapted by other users, and then

reintroduced back into the internet as good images.It has been created as a way to find a

creative use for out unwanted data. Built from a central premise that we store too much

information on our computers, and much of it we no longer use for, the site has been created

9
http://www.joepevans.com/recycler


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CHAPTER 2. INTRODUCTION

as a way in which to pose the question: What should we be doing with all this data?

This thesis provides a context for this work, looking into three major issues. Firstly in Chapter 3

the question is widened out to look at the amount of data being produced, internationally and

at a personal level, along side the environmental issues surrounding data storage. Chapter

3.3 covers the reasons for an artistic reaction to this issue within a discussion on the changing

state of art on the internet. Chapter 4 builds on the earlier ideas, looking at how the concept

for The Digital Photo Recycler developed along with a key idea, what makes something Good

and Bad and how we decide a piece of data should be deleted. Finally, Chapter 5 looks

at how the site was developed and outcomes from it, along with ways that the previous

concepts were implemented and incorporation of several key ideas of Open Source and CrowdSourcing methodology taken from Clay Shirkeys Here Comes Everybody(Shirky, 2008) and

Eric S Raymonds The Cathedral and the Bazaar(Raymond, 2001).



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Chapter 3

The impetus for digitally recycled

art

3.1 Have I Got Too Much Data?

The idea for this project sprang from a simple and personal observation. I now have countless

gigabytes of files and information, spread across multiple formats, pieces of hardware, and

saved on various cloud services and social networks, often files are duplicated several times

and often its not even something I want or need. As data storage becomes exponentially

cheaper, I have almost no incentive whatsoever to get rid of any of it, or even save it in

sensible ways so that I could find it if I needed to.

So what should I do with this worthless or bad data, be it pointless copies of essays, songs I

never want to hear again, or all my inane photographs from the past 78 years?

This initial reflection on my own computer usage led to the following train of thought: We are

creating lots of data, we do not necessarily need it but while keeping it is having an impact

on the planet, getting rid of it is not a viable solution, therefore is there a way to reduce, reuse

or recycle data.

11


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3.1. HAVE I GOT TOO MUCH DATA? CHAPTER 3. IMPETUS

3.1.1 More and More and More Data

Firstly to get a view of the problem of data creation divorced from my personal situation, Itook a brief international perspective on the issue.

According to the IDC Digital Universe report(Gantz and Reinsel, 2011), we are due to create

1.8 zetta bytes of data this year. So far 1,206,983,792,167,970,948,719 bytes of information

have been created1 .

This impossibly large number, 1.2 Zettabytes, or 1.2 trillion gigabytes, is difficult to even explain

by relating it to real world objects. IDC have tried by telling us that 1.2 Zettabytes is equal to

75 billion fully-loaded 16 GB Apple iPads, which would fill the entire area of Wembley Stadiumto the brim 41 times. (IDC, 2010) but even then this and other attempts to rationalise such

huge numbers is almost impossible. But that is just for this year, the speed at which data

is being created is also ever increasing even outrunning Moores Law itself(Moore, 1965) with

total amount of data more than doubling every two years. The important fact to garner from

this, and what we all know is that we keep making more data and keep needing somewhere

to put it.

The 400 kB that a 3.5 Inch floppy disk could hold seemed like a huge amount of data, andindeed it is or at least was. We can now set up a free account with a service like Gmail or

Dropboxand get instant access to thousands of times more storage space2 . And somehow

even with this ever increasing amounts of storage, we expand to fill the gap and then expand

further.

IDC are keen to point out that user generated content is around 10% of this data being created.

The other 90% is composed of credit records, surveillance photos, analytics on behaviour,

web-use histories, and so on.(Gantz and Reinsel, 2010) and also that much of it is only in

existence for short amounts of time.

It is impossible to ignore the surprising fact stated in last years Digital Universe Report that

1Viewed 10th August 2011, go to http://www.emc.com/leadership/programs/digital-universe.htm2At the time of writing, Gmail offers over 7.6 Gigabytes of storage and Dropbox offers an initial 2Gb for free with

up to 8Gb available if you invite others to the service

http://www.emc.com/leadership/programs/digital-universe.htmhttp://-/?-http://www.dropbox.com/http://www.gmail.com/http://-/?-


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3.1. HAVE I GOT TOO MUCH DATA? CHAPTER 3. IMPETUS

IDC estimates that in 2009, if people had wanted to store every gigabyte of digital content

created, they would have had a shortfall of around 35%. (Gantz and Reinsel, 2010) and this

gap is ever widening. We cannot store all the data which is being created, so how do we

decide what to keep and what we can lose?

3.1.2 Personal Unwanted Data

Even with most of this data being created and stored is outwith our control, our own personal

levels of data storage are still impossibly large My own saved data puts me somewhere

between 300 and 500 Gb. I can be reasonably sure that much of this data I will never needagain: saved emails, old essays and almost every photograph I have taken in the past 7-8

years.

Logic would say that the most prescient thing to do with these unwanted artefacts would

be to delete them. But in a world where even mobile phones and music players having the

capacity to hold thousands of photographs, it is barely worth the effort. This is compounded

by a second shared experience: you spring clean your computer, deleting a whole host of

files in the process; then later that day, week or month you remember a file you had with

just the bit of information you need, and then on looking for it remember that it was deemed

worthless in the past and has now been lost to you.

3.1.3 How to Decide if Something is Worth Keeping?

An early decision was taken to concentrate on an artistic basis for this project, concentrating

specifically on digital photographs. As a result I decided to concentrate on a broadly aesthetic

definition of what should or should not be kept: that of the simple, universal terms of good

or bad, with the idea that good photographs are the ones we keep, share and use, while the

bad photos are the ones which stay on our hard drive but are never put to any use. There is

more discussion on this issue in section 4.2.



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3.2. REDUCE, REUSE AND RECYCLING THE DIGITAL CHAPTER 3. IMPETUS

3.2 Reduce, Reuse and Recycling the Digital

In the physical world, the environmental movement, has gained much credence over the last

40 years, and one of its key tenets has been that of the waste hierarchy: that well known

mantra of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, popularised as long ago as the first World Earth Day

in 1970(Cooper, 1998). This idea makes definite sense in the physical world where waste

storage or destruction have a wide variety of environmental repercussions and a limited store

of resources mean that as consumption and population continue to increase we must do

what we can to limit the impact we each make on the world.

In the digital world, these issues are less obvious but increasingly relevant. As mentionedabove, we do not have space for all the data we are creating. Data farms are becoming an

ever more common aspect of our landscape, these huge warehouses full of servers take up

huge tracts of land, often with little or no consideration taken for the surrounding landscape, and

using huge amounts of power. Political pressure and public opinion demands these facilities

be built to maintain the growth and proliferation of internet access for all.

Slowly an understanding of this is growing, for example Google, while creating multiple massive

data centres around the world are keen to explain the efficiencies of their systems and thepractices they are putting in to reduce their fuel useage(Google, 2011).

With ever more data being created, and not enough space for it, so I was keen to work out

some way of reducing the amount of data an individual is creating, reusing it or recycling it to

create something new and of more worth.

3.3 Narrowing Down a Use for Unwanted Data

I decided that the best move forward was to take an artistic approach that took advantage

of the digital nature of the problem.

Again an aim of finding an artistic use for unwanted digital content sparked several more key

thoughts:



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3.3. NARROWING DOWN CHAPTER 3. IMPETUS

3.3.1 The Death and Life of net.art

Figure 3.1: S c r e e n s h o t o f

http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/betalab/index.html

(1996)

Throughout the 1990s the burgeoning in-ternet culture was the catalyst for the

self proclaimed net.art movement but

within 10 years it was the common be-

lief that it was over almost before it had

begun that conceptualism had given

way to slick software tricks(Stallabrass,

2002, p126). With the perspective af-

forded by time, its possible to see that in

the long run there has been an evolution

of internet art rather than rather than a

wholesale rejection of it.

Internet Art of the 1990s commonly focused on the very nature of the internet itself, or

purposefully confusing the user, purposefully ignoring the norms of the internet which had

already been adopted.. A classic example of this approach is http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/

(figure 3.1) a website which forgoes the usability we expect in a website, with an indecipherable

structure the user is forced to click randomly through a series of pages containing apparently

graphics and unclear buttons.

As we have moved from a world where the internet is a new, intriguing and unknown element

to one where it is ubiquitous, and the internet has moved forward with new options and

applications available to web developers, so the art being produced with it has moved forward.

Many works now revolve around the rise of social networks on the internet, or the social

implications of how ingrained the internet has become in every day life. For example The

Cybraphon created by Edinburgh Band FOUND in reaction to the Myth of the Band That Was

Signed Through Myspace (Found, 2009). Rhe Cybraphon is a robotic band created from a

multitude of antique objects which creates music based on how much the internet is talking

about it. Here the focus has moved away from fetishism of the structure of the internet itself

http://cybraphon.com/about/http://cybraphon.com/about/http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/betalab/index.html


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3.4. WHAT CAN WE DO WITH ALL THIS DATA? CHAPTER 3. IMPETUS

towards the socialogical aspect of the internet, commenting on our increasing obsession with

what the internet is saying about us along with an attempt to create a physical embodiment

of the nonphysical essence of the internet.

3.4 What Can We Do With All This Data?

This range of ideas led to one major question:

What can we do with all this data? Can we use digital processes to recycle

unwanted bad digital content and turn it into something good?



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Chapter 4

Conceptual Development

4.1 Original Concept

Figure 4.1: Ebbets, Charles C: Lunch atop a

Skyscraper(1932)

To narrow down the field from the idea

of recycling bad digital content and mak-

ing it into something good, several deci-

sions and realisations were made very

early on. Firstly to reduce the range of

media to concentrate solely on finding

something relating to images. As far as

my own personal data storage is con-

cerned images are one of the largest

culprits, and also as a visual art enthusi-

ast, with a range of skills in that area, it

was an obvious avenue to take.

The second was that there was a need

to find an important incentive not just delete photos; as while one person may think a pho-

tograph is bad, others may find worth in it. Thirdly and most crucially was the decision to

17


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4.1. ORIGINAL CONCEPT CHAPTER 4. CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

combine this idea with an interest in the ecological implications of our exponentially increasing

data storage needs. As discussed in 3.2 I adopted the idea of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and

was going to try and find a way of enacting this philosophy in the digital realm.

Figure 4.2: Da Vinci, Leonardo: The Mona Lisa (1503

to 1505)

The original concept was to take the

pixel data from unwanted bad photos

and use them to recreate well known

good photos such as The Mona Lisa

(figure 4.2) or New York Construction

Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam by

Charles C. Ebbets (figure 4.1). This wouldin essence create a store of high qual-

ity images for which users would be en-

couraged to link directly to these images

instead of uploading them multiple times

across the web. One of the major ideas

behind this was to take inspiration from

the hyperlink, one of the key innovations

in http, in that it means that any piece

of data theoretically only needs to be

on the internet in one place and can be

linked to from other locations, in real-

ity, much data and especially media is

stored multiple times.

4.1.1 Problems With This Idea

With this idea, of turning a bad image into a copy of something good, it was quickly apparent

there was a flaw with the planned project. All that this would be doing would be making

one more version of a photo on the internet, contributing to rather than solving the problem.



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4.2. GOODNESS AND BADNESS CHAPTER 4. CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

Instead I decided to find a way of making something genuinely new out of something old,

which would provide far more options with which to take the project in new directions, and

engage directly with the idea of Digital Recycling.

4.2 Goodness and Badness

On having decided that I wanted to find peoples unwanted photos, and trying to find a way

of taking bad photos and making them good, it was prescient to research the nature of bad,

and conversely of good, and what we mean by them.

4.2.1 Good and Bad Art, Beauty and Aesthetics

Without moving to far into the realm of philosophical ideas, its surprisingly difficult to find

definitions of Good or Bad art, but there has been much written on what defines art, as well

as concepts such as aestheticism and beauty. As a result I looked increasingly towards this

end of criticism.

We have no formula, and indeed can have no formula, which will enable usto pick out artworks in the way we can pick the bagels out in a bakeshop: for ifbagel had the logic of of artwork, a pumpkin pie could be a bagel. (Danto, 1981,p61)

Danto makes this slightly point during a discussion of William Kennicks Does Traditional Aes-

thetics Rest On Mistake and it formed the key for my understanding of my key words of Good

and Bad.

In the modern age, what really constitutes a work of art is that someone declares that it isone. When writing of his selection process, Michael Frank, the current curator in chief of The

Museum of Bad Art in Massachussetts, pithily misquotes1 Bad art is like pornography in that,

while I finds it difficult to articulately define it, I knows it when I see it.(Frank, 2008) but as

1from Justice Potter Stewarts statement during Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1974 I shall not today attempt further todefine the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description(pornography); and perhapsI could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it (Gewirtz, 1996)

http://-/?-


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with good art I think it is much more subjective and individual than this perhaps suggests. Art

does not have an inbuilt beauty, nor is it automatically art, or good art, or bad art, but rather I

would surmise that its up to the viewer.

In the Theory of Beauty, written at the start of the Twentieth Century, E Carrit wrote:

When we say that the beauty of all things is one, it is not meant that if theunaesthetic elements of each were abstracted what was left in all would be indis-

tinguishable; nor that they are all approximations to some ideal thing which aloneis purely beautiful. (Carritt, 1931, p18)

That Carrit can be read as saying that there is not a platonic beauty, in the same way that

there is a platonic chair, is important. Beauty is not a universal which can be distilled, butchanges from person to person, situation to situation, and time to time. Alain De Botton brings

up a similar point in his discussion of beauty in architecture:

We could say that nothing in architecture is ever ugly in itself; it is merely inthe wrong place or of the wrong size, while beauty is the child of the coherentrelationship between the parts. (De Botton, 2006, p218)

These distinctions became key to the ideology behind The Digital Photo Recycler. While the

uploaded image may have been perceived as bad by whoever uploaded it, that does notmean that other users of the site may not find aesthetic quality in it.

Later Carrit remarks the fact seems to remain that we do come too find beauty in things

or visions of which we had long been aware.(Carritt, 1931, p287) which led to a second

important understanding and importantly a counter argument to anyone who would say that

they just delete photos that they dont like: what happens when you realise you actually liked

it?

By uploading unwanted photographs to The Digital Photo Recycler the user is performing

two important acts with respect to their unwanted photographs, firstly allowing others to find

beauty where they cant see it, and secondly backing up the photograph so that it can be

retrieved at a later date in the off chance it is needed.



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4.2.2 Good and Bad in Photography

Figure 4.3: Chilean Miners

There are countless books, websitesand courses where you can be taught

about the rule of thirds, the golden ra-

tio or important facts about the appro-

priate amount of headroom. For exam-

ple the BBC advise Be aware of how

people are framed in your shot and Al-

ways keep your horizons (any horizon-

tal lines) level in your photographs, oth-

erwise your shots will appear crooked.

(Ang, 2005).

Figure 4.4: UnrealDiscords best photo of 2010

Two things become abundantly clear if

you look into examples of such advise:

firstly there is no equivalent for bad pho-

tography, no handy how too on taking

the ultimate bad photograph, and sec-

ondly that any rules that are shared on

how to take a good photograph are not

rules, they are guidelines, and they can

definitely be broken.

I asked the question of readers of the

Digital Photo Recycler Blog What makes

a photo rubbish? And even with only a few replies its easy to see that composition and

blur/focus are high up on the list, while there are a number of acknowledgments that even if

a photo is technically of poor quality it can have sentimental or aesthetic value(See Appendix

A.1)

As examples of this fact, I have selected a number of photographs from a variety of sources

http://%60%60http//digitalphotorecycler.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/what-makes-a-photo-rubbish/%60


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which do not fit the acknowledged rules of Good Photography but which in a variety of ways

could all be considered good photographs.

Figure 4.5: The Pale Blue Dot

Figure 4.3 is a low resolution image in

which the subject is clouded by all sorts

of noise and imperfections. But a good

enough image to be selected by Time

magazine as one of the 29 best pho-

tos of 2010 because it is one of the first

photographs of the Chilean Miners who

were trapped under ground.

Figure 4.4 has been included in the Flickr

group your best of 2010 by user Un-

realDiscord. While it ignores almost ev-

ery standard rule in portrait photography,

it is enigmatic, fun and artistic and cru-

cially tells us something about its author.

It is easy to see why UnrealDiscord de-cided it was a good photo.

The Pale Blue Dot (Figure 4.5) is a photo-

graph taken by Voyager 1 at the request

of Carl Sagan. This is the most distant photograph to have been taken of the earth and it

fails in almost every rule of photography, its blurry, the subject is unclear and so on, yet it is

an incredible photograph which tells us something unique about being human and our place

in the universe.

That does not prove the contributors to the blog wrong, and its reasonable to say that an in

focus, well composed photograph has a higher chance of being good, but crucially we need

to realise that a technically bad photograph is not bad for just this reason. What makes a

photo bad has much more to do with what the viewer reads into it.

http://%60http//www.flickr.com/photos/heart_of_discord/with/5270372776/http://%60http//www.flickr.com/photos/heart_of_discord/with/5270372776/http://%60http//www.flickr.com/groups/yourbestshot-2010/pool/%60http://%60http//www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2036245_2217601,00.html/%60http://%60http//www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2036245_2217601,00.html/%60


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As one contributor to the blog made this point in reference to wedding photographs:

Some of them are not best quality but capture tiny little vignettes from theday. Some are really good quality but dont mean much. Id rather have a slightlyblurry picture of a great moment but thats for personal photos.(Appendix A.1)

Figure 4.6: An uploaded photo which I think is good.

This question over what makes a photo

good or bad, and that these labels are

constantly used of art works but every-

ones opinion will be different became a

constant influence on this project, from

the website strapline of making bad pho-

tos good, to the rating system influence

by hotornot.com style websites, where

the criteria for rating really is left down

to the user.

By taking the universally understandable while ultimately undefinable and highly subjective

terms, good and bad, much emphasis is put directly onto the contributors.

I have tried as much as possible to keep my opinions to myself and instead let the contributor

decide what makes an image qualify for the site. The closest I can come to a description of

a photo that should be uploaded to the site is:

Whenever you take photos, there are always a number which forever reasonyou wont use, or print, or upload to a social network or photo sharing website,the ones that you quickly flick past when showing them to friends or colleagues.These are the sort of photo you should be uploading to The Digital Photo Recycler.

As to what makes a photo good, I am entirely without a definition. All that I can say is thatphotos one person may put squarely into the above bad category, another would concede

is actually good. As it stands, there are many photos (such as figure 4.6) which have been

uploaded to the recycler which I like and have all sorts of positive attributes.

http://hotornot.com/


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4.3. ARTISTIC RECYCLING CHAPTER 4. CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

4.3 Artistic Recycling

There is a strong history in modern artistic history of finding beauty in things which may

previously have been seen as without artistic merit. There are a huge number of antecedents

to what I was trying to achieve with unwanted digital photographs. In other words, in the

development of this project I took to heart the famous misquotation of Picasso that Good

Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal2and here are some of the people I have borrowed ideas

from.

Figure 4.7: Duchamp, Marcel: Fountain(1917)Figure 4.8: Mondrian, Piet: Composition withYellow, Blue and Red (1937-42)

2 its a quote more accurately attributed to TS Elliot as Good Poets Borrow, Great Poets Steal itself a misquoteof One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immaturepoets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better,or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different

than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet willusually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.(Eliot, 1997) for much moreinformation on this story see(Prager, 2007)

http://-/?-


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4.3. ARTISTIC RECYCLING CHAPTER 4. CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

Duchamps Readymades

These took every day discarded items and turned them into art, essentially by declaring themas art.(see figure 4.7) That what one person may consider just a functional item, like a coat

rack of urinal, another can see as a piece of art, can be seen as a key influence on the idea

within the site that while one person may think an image is bad, others may see it in another

light.

Mondrians Neoplasticism

In these works Mondrian made nonrepresentational images that represented specific ideas,

similarly a number of the filters in The Digital Photo Recycler will turn an image into something

quite unrecognisable while still keeping some essence of the image (see figure 4.8). For

example, the sort by filters which reorganise the order of pixels in an image by colour, giving

a new perspective on the image.

William Burroughs Cut-up technique and its descendants in Poetry and Music

The idea of chopping up and combining words, had a great influence on a number of filters

such as Checkers and Alternate, but also the execution of the Mondrian filter.

The use of Sampling in Popular Music

The idea of cutting up, reorganising and reappropriating parts of songs could be seen almost

as a follow on from aspects of the cut up technique, yet with more ordering. Of specific

interest was artists DJ Shadow (see figure 4.9), Mr Scruff and Lemon Jelly who in the 1990s

started to move away from traditional sources of samples such as Funk and Soul and started

looking in less conventional places to find more interesting or unused sounds.

These ideas of collating and combining images to create something new, perhaps similar to the

original, perhaps greatly changed were all key influences on The Digital Photo Recycler.



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4.4. REVISED CONCEPT CHAPTER 4. CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

Figure 4.9: B+: Cover Art for Entroducing by DJ Shadow (1996)

4.4 Revised Concept

This wide range of disparate ideas discussed so far coalesced into the final concept for the

project:

A collaborative digital photography tool in which unwanted bad photographscan be collected, shared, and adapted by other users, and then reintroduced backinto the internet as good images.

As with when we put a bottle in a bottle bank for their reuse, I planned to create a website

where by giving up control and ownership of their photos, users would be unleashing the

photos potential to become good photos.



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Chapter 5

Creating The Digital Photo

Recycler

It is inappropriate to use the computer to address artistic issues that are betteraddressed using other technologies (Malina, 1990, p34)

In making The Digital Photo Recycler, there was a keen movement away from traditional

photographic processes, and to embrace the opportunities afforded by digital media. As it has

been inspired by the wealth of digital content we now possess, and finding new uses for it,

this project is inextricably intertwined with the digital world and throughout its development

a number of key digital areas where explored. By making it a website and declaring it as a

collaborative tool, a few key facts were implied which needed to be understood and acted

upon.

I needed a way to easily alter photographs in a variety of ways, I needed to build a website to

host the project and I needed to make it of significant worth that people would want to use

it. Over the coming pages, we will look at two key aspects of this work which would have

been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without a digital context. Firstly looking

at the use of Processing, a programming environment developed specifically for visual art,

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5.1. MAKING THE RECYCLER CHAPTER 5. CREATING THE DIGITAL PHOTO RECYCLER

and secondly looking into the utilisation of a user base across the web, both through use of

the website and in the development of the site itself.

5.1 Making the Recycler

In the world of digital photography, the killer app is undoubtedly AdobePhotoshop, a hugely

powerful tool which enables the user to take photographic images and combine, edit and fix

them in a huge variety of ways. It has been followed by a variety of imitators such as The

GIMP, one of the first open source applications (Raymond, 2001, p93), online photo editors like

pixlr.comand picnik.comalong with a multitude of mobile apps and other tools.

The development of computer graphics appears to run modernism in re-verseAdvanced computer graphics tend to be as obsessively naturalistic and

fussy as nineteenth-century history painting. (Stallabrass, 2002, p34)

Stallabrass is talking here about developments in 3D Graphics, it can be seen that there is

a similar impetus in digital photography. While there is a wide range of further functionality

available in such programmes, the primary focus of programmes like these is based in tradi-

tional photographic processes. The aim is to clean up and fine tune photographs, removing

imperfections or fixing unintended inclusions or what is normally meant when people refer to

Photoshopping1.

There have been several examples of programmes created in reaction to this, trying to create

alternatives to this style of image manipulation. Most notably Signwaves Autoshop: an

explorative parody of professional bitmap graphic manipulation software (Signwave, 1999).

With this programme control was taken away from the user and put in the hands of the

programme itself which could impose its own creative agendas upon the user.

While taking inspiration from this, my key aim was in finding ways to simply and easily adjust

and combine photos. I wanted to find ways to manipulate an image which moved away from

1Please note that this terminology is incorrect and that Adobediscourage the use of Photoshop as a verb, so weshould say The image was enhanced using AdobePhotoshopsoftware (Adobe, 2009)

http://www.signwave.co.uk/go/products/autoshophttp://-/?-http://www.picnik.com/http://pixlr.com/http://www.gimp.org/http://www.gimp.org/


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traditional processes to create more abstract forms but which could be clearly understood by

the user.

The other key shift in The Digital Photo Recycler is that the user his never creating a finished

product. in the long term their actions are just a step in a process which can be built upon

by future users (this idea is expanded upon further in Section 5.2.

5.1.1 Choosing Processing

Having made the decisions above, the first step was to find a way to make an online photo

editor. The two avenues I investigated were MaxMSP/Jitter and Processing. Each had advan-

tages and disadvantages, but with little programming experience to fall back on the decision

was based primarily on the ease of incorporating the programme into a website, and the

ease of learning the system. I therefore chose to use Processing which describes itself as

a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001

has promoted software literacy within the visual arts (Fry and Reas, 2011). As the idea itself

is a little obtuse, I aimed to make this site as simple and easy to use as possible by utilising

Processing.js, which converts Processings java based code into javasript enabling it to be

rendered within the HTML5 Canvas Element.

5.1.2 Filters

On settling upon using Processing, the first task was to find out what options could be cre-

ated for users to manipulate photographs. Figure 5.1 shows some early results from these

processes, all of which have been developed over the intervening weeks and along with other

filters incorporated into the website..

24 filters have been created which will achieve a multitude of effects ranging from turning

an image to black and white, to moving every pixel to another point on the image, to spitting

colour values of two images and transposing them over the top of each other. In Appendix

B I have included all the relevant code used to create these with some explanation of the



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Figure 5.1: Early Example of Filter Results

technical idiosyncrasies involved in their execution, to go into this in too much more detail here

would be reductive and would divert from the aims of this essay.



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5.2. THE WISDOM OF CROWDS CHAPTER 5. CREATING THE DIGITAL PHOTO RECYCLER

5.2 The Wisdom of Crowds

The primary effect of creative interaction within computer networks is to renderobsolete the distinction in absolute terms between the artist and viewer as producer

and consumer, respectively. (Ascott, 1988)

Throughout the development of the internet, there has been a growing move towards the use

of crowds, and crowd sourcing, as chronicled in works such as Eric S. Raymonds The Cathe-

dral and The Bazaar(Raymond, 2001) and also Clay Shirkys Here Comes Everybody(Shirky,

2008).

User interaction was encouraged not only through getting people to use the site to find

beauty in unwanted photos, and create new images, but also the development of the site

and interface itself. To this end I adopted Eric S. Raymonds mantra of Release early, release

often and took particular notice of the less quoted second half of this rule And listen to your

customers(Raymond, 2001) (see 5.3.2 for more on this). In the first month after the websites

release, 10 specific versions were released, with a multitude of incremental increases in-

between. By constantly publicising the website and encouraging feedback from a range of

users, both with relevant technical knowledge and without, I was able to not only find and fix

bugs quicker but also to change planned progress on the site, and introduced new features

based on user feedback2.

5.3 Prototyping: v0.0.1 v0.0.3

The first version of the recycler was released on 24th June, with two versions following very

swiftly3

. These versions were released very much as test cases, only allowing the user tomanipulate a select group of 12 photographs. There was a severe lack of core functionality

with no options for uploading images or saving those created. What this allowed for though

2feedback came from a variety of sources during this project. These included the project blog digitalphotorecy-cler.wordpress.com/and a comments pageadded to the website on 20th July, these were supplemented throughconversations and interactions undertaken with users through Facebook.

3version 0.0.3 can still be viewed at http://people.ace.ed.ac.uk.uk/students/s1061294/recycler/index.html

http://people.ace.ed.ac.uk.uk/students/s1061294/recycler/index.htmlhttp://joepevans.com/joe/comment.phphttp://digitalphotorecycler.wordpress.com/http://digitalphotorecycler.wordpress.com/http://-/?-http://-/?-


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5.3. PROTOTYPING CHAPTER 5. CREATING THE DIGITAL PHOTO RECYCLER

Figure 5.2: The Digital Photo Recycler v0.0.3



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was a chance to get a version of it out into the open and to begin the process of gaining user

feedback and adapting to it. But as Raymond suggests, users will forgive early buggy versions

of a programme, if their suggestions are taken on board and new versions are published swiftly

(Raymond, 2001).

5.3.1 Moving Forward

The key feedback at this time was, as could be expected, that users wanted to be able to

upload their own unwanted photographs. Not only were these options integral to the stated

aim of the project, but also reflects common practices in websites today. Interaction and usergenerated content is key in the current internet age, and to the success of this tool.

This proved more difficult than first expected. While setting up an upload system was relatively

easy, two aspects of this leap forward in development where more complicated and both rose

out of an earlier decision: choosing to use Processing.js to realize the project. I shall discuss

these two issues in some depth, as examples of the sort of issues encountered throughout

the development of this project.

Recycle Bank

The first issue, was due to an idiosyncrasy of the Processing.js system, because of it s use

of javascript. Images have to be preloaded at the top of the page, outside of the normal

processing code and therefore variables cannot be passed to it. While there was going to be

an ever changing, ever expanding store of images available it was clear that having all the

images available was going to be impractical at best. As a result, I developed a metaphor

based upon an idea from the recycling movement, that of the recycle bank.

The Recycle Bank is currently limited to 20 images, taken from recently uploaded images and

images created through the recycler. While this solved a problem from a user point of view,

there was still the issue of how to generate a dynamic list of photographs.



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The first solution I found was by saving a second copy of any image added to The Digital

Photo Recycler, saved with a file name of between 1 and 20, and then naming these images

in the preload section of the processing file. This had several problems, relating to the speed

at which pages reloaded, and if images were recycled in quick succession often incorrect

meta data was stored, also any errors with this system caused the Recycle function to stop

working.

Surprisingly a search of relevant websites and forums did not yield any solution to the problem

but a second, more elegant solution was realised through trial and error. By changing the

processing file to a .php file and then putting an include to an external file within the preload

section, I was then able to dynamically create a list of images based on a database query.This small background change would have been almost perceivable to the user but created a

system which worked more efficiently, had less errors and most importantly meant that the

system was far less likely to break.4

Canvas to Image

As discussed above, Processing.js renders its results within the canvas object, which is not an

image but a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs,

game graphics, or other visual images on the fly(Community, 2011) and cannot therefor be

saved, this caused me one further problem: I needed to be able to save the images.. This

was then compounded by a need to save variables and other meta data with the image, and

to do it in as few clicks as possible. This was eventually achieved through a selection of tools

from PHP, AJAX and MySQL working in sequence.

A key piece of code was taken from an online tutorials to create this, HTML5: Saving Canvas

Image Data Using PHP And Ajax onpermadi.org (Permadi, 2010)5 This was further developed

and combined with some further javascript functions to make sure that all the correct data

was uploaded as asynchronously as possible. The code used to produce this is included in

Appendix B.

4This was implemented in v0.2.1 on 20th July.5http://www.permadi.com/blog/2010/10/html5-saving-canvas-image-data-using-php-and-ajax/

http://www.permadi.com/blog/2010/10/html5-saving-canvas-image-data-using-php-and-ajax/http://-/?-http://www.permadi.com/blog/2010/10/html5-saving-canvas-image-data-using-php-and-ajax/http://-/?-


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5.3.2 Release Early, Release Often

The realisation of this core functionality, moved the site from just being a declaration of intentto a working tool was included in version 0.1.0, released on 5th July, less than 2 weeks after

the original site was launched. From this point, further work on the site has revolved around

refinement and reaction to user feedback to increase the user experience. Also from this point

I was able to log user input and start to see photos being recycled, merged and evolving.

Important changes made from user suggestion included:

The kaleidoscope filters A.3.1

Javascript pop-ups to advise of uploaded A.2

Thumbnails for images in the recycler A.2

Descriptions of filters A.2

These comments, along with a multitude of discussions and informal testing by friends and

family were key to the fluid programming like approach I was aiming for in the development of

this tool and an example of a Release Early, Release Often mentality. By targeting a wide range

of users during this stage, not only casual users, but people with a range of programming, web

development and design knowledge, I was able to enact another of Raymonds aphorisms:

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement

and effective debugging. While this project was not being developed in a truly open source

fashion and I was the only one developing the code, being able to take suggestions, not only for

features in the tool but also in certain finer points of technical detail, bug checking, or sources

of more information on given fixes was often invaluable. In Figure 5.3 the implementation of

several of these features can be seen.

Power Distribution

Even on this very small scale of user responses, by charting comments made by various users

to the development of The Digital Photo Recycler its easy to see evidence of something close



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Figure 5.3: The Digital Photo Recycler v0.3.3



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Figure 5.4: Responses through blog, website and Facebook for the Digital Photo Recycler

to the power distribution curve as discussed in Clay shirkys Here Comes Everybody (Shirky,

2008). While it is not quite reaching the 80/20 ratio he discusses6, the fall off from the most

active participants is swift and the long tail of users only providing one interaction is definitely

apparent. As there is no way of tracking users on the site itself is more tricky but anecdotaly

I believe that this distribution is also apparent.

5.3.3 Removing Responsibility

In 4.4 I stated that I wanted to create a website where by giving up control and ownership of

their photos, users would be unleashing the photos potential to become good photos. I have

resisted the urge to give the user the opportunity to claim responsibility for a given photo

on the site. As the web has become more and more social, there has been an increasing

620% of the users do 80% of the work.

http://-/?-


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5.4. RESULTS CHAPTER 5. CREATING THE DIGITAL PHOTO RECYCLER

imperative for web developers to provide users ways to claim little bits of a site as their own

for others to see. Like the work of 1990s Internet artists reacting to the norms of the Internet

in their day, this could be seen as my own little reaction to the norms of today. But more

importantly it allowed for another implicit example if the fact that users are acting as agents or

catalysts for the development of an image, rather than the creator of a specific image.

5.4 Results

Figure 5.5: A bad generated image

The work created through the Digital Photo Recycler so far is mixed to say the least. One

critic of the site remarked on the website Its really just making ok photos worse?(Appendix:

A.2) and indeed, I would count a large number of images such as 5.5 created on the site as

bad.

However there are quite a number of images, which do have some form of aesthetic quality

too them. What is interesting to note is that they come from a variety of points in the process,some are 1st or second generation images, some are 7 or 8 generations in, some look very

like the original images, and some have become entirely abstract. Equally while some filters

and selections of filters have a distinctly web 1.0 look about them, some look much closer to

traditional photographic processes and artistic works. 5.8 shows that even from one rather dull

image The Digital Photo Recycler can create a wide and unexpected variety of results.



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5.5. AVERAGE USE OF THE SITE CHAPTER 5. CREATING THE DIGITAL PHOTO RECYCLER

Figure 5.6: Checker: Level 1 Variation Figure 5.7: Checker: Level 12 Variation

5.5 Average Use of the Site

One key observation of use of the site, is that users are not using the site as intended. It

appears that often users upload one or two unwanted photographs and then use one or two

filters on those images, rather than as was intended, playing with and developing previously

uploaded photographs, which personally had always been a key interest in the site. Whether

this is really a problem which should be fixed, or an issue with the site is up for debate.

There are a number of hypothesis I have as to why this is the case. It could be that as a result

of the user based paradigm of the Internet discussed in section 5.3.3, users are just unused to

being able to so freely able to alter content of others, or expect that any image manipulation

tool must in some way relate to the way we are used to using AdobePhotoshop. Equally

it could be a more mundane issue relating to the user interface and how the concept on the

site is explained.

5.6 The Digital Photo Recycler as a Tool

A further interesting and unexpected result of the site, which manifested itself throughout

its development, was that it became in its own way a functional image manipulation tool



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5.6. THE RECYCLER AS A TOOL CHAPTER 5. CREATING THE DIGITAL PHOTO RECYCLER

Figure 5.8: The Evolution of a Single Image



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5.6. THE RECYCLER AS A TOOL CHAPTER 5. CREATING THE DIGITAL PHOTO RECYCLER

Figure 5.9: Generated Seascape Figure 5.10: Concattonated Checks

Figure 5.11: Reintegrated Image Figure 5.12: Splitting Text

as an individual user. This may seem an odd statement, but the filters where developed so

as to provide alternatives to traditional processes. What quickly became apparent though

was that with only a little practice you can start to learn the sorts of results a given filter is

likely to create and then learn sequences of processes that will result in pleasing or specific

results.

For example images that look like seascapes such as figure 5.9 will almost always appear

as the result of a sort filter followed by a blur. An interesting effect that can be created by

repeatedly using the checkers filter with increasing square sizes such as in figure 5.10.

Similarly there are often interesting results to be had by combining two images with a single

parent such as in figure 5.11 or by using split colour 3 or 4 with photos with text in, where often



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5.7. TAKING IT FURTHER CHAPTER 5. CREATING THE DIGITAL PHOTO RECYCLER

the text will be isolated and can be combined with another image such as figure 5.12.

5.7 Taking It Further

There are a number of key ways that this site could be taken forward, mainly regrading

improvements to filters or adding more filters and also with regards to the user interface.

The number of possibilities as to specific filters is almost limitless: I would be especially

interested more mathmatically based filters, for example developing a fractal based filter;

or filters which worked by extracting data from an image and displaying that instead of the

original photographic representation.

As time has gone on I have tried to increase options for varying filters, with only 8 filters having

no variable parameters. Some of these would be hard to implement as to finding an easy

way to vary them (such as invert) while some have been left due to time constraints such as

rotate. But I am wary to move beyond the simple parameter currently in place. While it could

be interesting to make it closer to a standard photographic tool, or try to develop new styles

of manipulation, the limited nature of the control, continue to add to the effect of taking the

user out of a role of creator: one can only be so creative in a single use of the recycler.

A key way to improve the site would also be to develop functionality for it to work across other

platforms, especially on mobile phones. As it stands it is possible to access some functionality

on some mobile phones, but support varies. Development of a mobile site or Apps specifically

tailored to mobile phones would greatly improve the usability of the site.

Also the development of the gallery section could be greatly improved, to find more ways of

searching and uses for images, including embed and share options for each image or providing

functionality to export the image in a variety of formats.



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Chapter 6

Conclusion

Through this thesis, and through the development of The Digital Photo Recycler I have at-

tempted to if not answer, at least to pose the question: What should we be doing with all this

data?

Despite ever the reducing cost and size of data storage, the speed that we are creating data

is increasing even faster.

The Digital Photo Recycler is not (nor is it meant to be) a realistic solution to the problem,

instead it can be seen as a way of further raising this question. Along side this it asks important

questions a to what we are keeping and why. I believe that what I have created is at the very

least a model for the sort of ways in which data could be recycled upon the internet, if not

actually a practical solution to problems with the oncoming storage drought. One question

that it does answer though is that if one person does not want a piece of data, this does

not mean that others will not find a use for it. It has however proved that definitely possible

to find ways to take bad photos and make them good (or at the very least a little more

interesting).

43
http://www.joepevans.com/recycler


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Appendix A

First Appendix: User Input

Throughout the development of The Digital Photo Recycler, I have actively encouraged input

from a wide selection of users. This section contains a variety of comments from users which

have either specifically informed certain aspects of the site or which are representational of

common comments..

A.1 Blog Comments

what really makes a good photo Gillian on June 14, 2011 at 7:13 am said: A really good photo

is one that catches a brilliant moment brilliantly. I love sports photos in newspapers even

though I m not a sports fan, because they capture fantastic snapshots of contorted bodies at

crucially tense moments in sports games.

Similarly, having just got married, I ve been sorting wedding photos. Some of them are notbest quality but capture tiny little vignettes from the day. Some are really good quality but

don t mean much. I d rather have a slightly blurry picture of a great moment but that s

for personal photos. The ones that fit both categories are rocking, of course.

what makes a photo rubbish Henry on May 20,2011 at 11:13 am said: I only keep bad photos

44
http://digitalphotorecycler.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/what-makes-a-photo-rubbish//commentshttp://digitalphotorecycler.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/what-makes-a-really-good-photo/comments


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A.2. RECYCLER:COMMENTS PAGE APPENDIX A. FIRST APPENDIX: USER INPUT

if they re amusing for some reason but generally I delete them if any of the following are

true:

Bad focus/blurry

Bad angle

Bad composition

Near identical duplicate of another photo

Amazingly obvious shot

Bad colour/light

A.2 Recycler:Comments Page

(July 22, 2011) Jung In said: So I think it is brilliant tool but as Joe said it is bit difficult understand

especially someone like me who has never trained graphic stuff. It would be much better to

have a brief description for each effect on the side.

(July 21, 2011) mim said: I like how the photo recycling all happens on one page now. It doesnt

take too long on my computer, but the internet has made my attention span very small and

my impatience very big!Maybe a wee rotating circle to show it is doing something would sooth

my impatience. Also - I imagine this is something that you are working on at the moment - I

cant upload images at all. I select them, then they do not preview. In general though, I think

it is really getting there!

(July 21, 2011) Lenka said: Joe, its cool :) I know that it is a work in progress but it might be

nice to have css for the gallery and the recyclebank so that it is nicer visually :D Also, whenI was choosing the pictures for recycling it was a bit annoying to try all the numbers to see

which one is which one. You could have thumbnails next to each number if it is possible... or

just something so that you know which number is which picture.

(July 20, 2011) Emma said: Its really fun and I really genuinely like some of the results. It runs



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A.3. OTHER FEEDBACK APPENDIX A. FIRST APPENDIX: USER INPUT

stupidly slowly on my computer (and makes everything else run slowly too) but Im guessing

maybe that cant be helped. The only other thing Id suggest is that when youre uploading and

after youve pressed preview, if you decide to click Add to Recycler (or whatever it actually

says) the bit of text that says something like your photo has been added to the recycler isnt

obvious unless you know to look for it - i.e. the first time I uploaded I wasnt sure if it was

still processing or if it hadnt worked or what. Perhaps a popup box like in the recycler section

might be better or just a more obvious text message on the page.

(July 30, 2011) Fiona said: Its really just making ok photos worse?

A.3 Other Feedback

A.3.1 From Facebook

Jonathan Knox was working well until it stopped! Hope I havent broken it? Oh kaleidescope

effect and do we get to see the original images? June 24 at 6:24pm

http://www.facebook.com/joepevans/posts/198351546884320

Fiona McKinlay I could give you many many opinions on this. With When you re uploading

photos, or choosing ones to include in a piece of work, or to show to your mum, I could

sometimes choose different photos for all three of these. A good photo to my mum is a

completely different thing to a good photo to my arty friends... A good photo to upload to

Flickr might not be a good photo to submit to a magazine... Criteria would include, with varied

weighting depending on audience/purpose, composition, colours, focus, sharpness, whether

the people in the picture are good looking or not (sorry, it does apply in some cases), whether

the person in the photo is the lead singer or just some session guitarist, uniqueness, inabilityto replicate the photo, empty space or lack thereof, orientation... I have a bad habit of taking

better portrait shots than landscape ones, but finding landscape ones to generally be more

useful... May 27 at 5:03pm


http://www.facebook.com/joepevans/posts/176758489045450http://www.facebook.com/joepevans/posts/198351546884320


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A.3. OTHER FEEDBACK APPENDIX A. FIRST APPENDIX: USER INPUT

Shaun Murphy parameters could have sine, triangle and square etc oscillator options, June 27

at 10.40am




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Appendix B

Filters and Processing.js Code

B.1 Introduction

The various filters used in the Digital Photo Recycler were the heart of this work and provided

not only much of the learning, but also the most engaging part of the website. They were

developed with Processing, an open source programming language and environment for

people who want to create images, animations, and interactions.(Fry and Reas, 2011) and

then realised within the website using Processing.js (Resig) a port of processing which converts

the original java code into javascript, making it possible to render within the HTML5 canvas

tag (See Dive Into HTML5 (Mark) for more on this). Over the coming pages there is a brief

descriptions of the various pieces of code used to make this work along with the relevant

code.

B.2 setup

All the filters for the digital photo recycler are housed within one file, with the relevant parts

of the code selected based on the parameters chosen by the user.

48
http://diveintohtml5.org/


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B.2. SETUP APPENDIX B. FILTERS AND PROCESSING.JS CODE

One of the few differences between Processing and Processing.js is the requirement to preload

images in a javascript command at the top of the page. As I required a dynamic set of

photographs available for recycling, this was loaded through a separate php file which in turn

queried the database to find out which images to preload.

/* @pjs preload= images/2ness.png; */

/*@pjs isTransparent=true;*/

PImage one,two;

color [] colors;

//s brings through first image url, t brings through second image url

and u brings the filter. In setup this is not currently required but has

been kept in place so that in future releases photos can be better

resized based on which filters are chosen.

void setup(string s, string t, int q) {

i n t i = 0 ;

String im=images/+s;

String im2=images/+t;

background (255,252,247,0);

one = loadImage(im);

two = loadImage(im2);

colors =new color[one.width*one.height];

size(one.width,one.height);

}



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B.3. FILTERS APPENDIX B. FILTERS AND PROCESSING.JS CODE

B.3 Filters

With the selection of a filter, two variables are passed to this file, the filter value and variation

(which is not always required) The first chooses a filter based on user selection (and appears

as s in the code), and the second affects a variety of parameters dependent on filter. 1 The

filters could roughly be split into 5 groups: simple, alternation, colour, reorganising pixels and

rearranging the image. There was also a 6th group of artistic filters planned, but at the time

of writing only one has been implemented.

B.3.1 Simple Processes

The first five filters created were based on built in functions of Processing and were taken

from examples in Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists(Reas,

2007) and for three filters I have added in some control based on the level of variation

selected. These comprise the most familiar and least experimental features of The Digital

Photo Recycler, with filters such as Grayscale and Blur, and should all be familiar to users of

photo editing programmes. These were developed as proof of concept and to check that

aspects of the programme would work as intended but have been left in to provide some

familiarity for the user and also as they can still provide interesting results, especially posterize

and blur which experience has taught me can be used to provide satisfying results as one

generation in a series of iterations of an image.

image(one,0,0);

filter(INVERT);

Invert

This literally inverts the colour values of an image, making a negative of the image.

1The variation level was defined as q, but for a variety of reasons had to be converted to other values, and appearsvariously as q, vari and k throughout this code.

http://-/?-


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Figure B.1: Inverted Photograph

Figure B.2: Grayscale: Level 1 Variation Figure B.3: Posterize: Level 12 Variation

Grayscale

colorMode(RGB,12);

int gry = 16-q;

tint(gry);

image(one,0,0);

filter(GRAY);



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The grayscale filter, makes images black and white using the inbuilt GRAY filter. It has been

modified with the use of a rudimentary contrast command based on the tint feature.

Figure B.4: Blurred: Level 1 Variation Figure B.5: Blurred: Level 12 Variation

Blur

image(one,0,0);

filter(BLUR, vari);

Figure B.6: Posterize: Level 1 Variation Figure B.7: Posterize: Level 12 Variation



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Posterize

image(one,0,0);filter(POSTERIZE,vari/3+2);

BLUR and POSTERIZE are quite self explanatory.

Figure B.8: Added Photographs

Add

one.blend(two,k,k,one.width,one.height,0,0,\\one.width,one.height,ADD);

image(one,0,0);

Add is one of a number of blending options available in Processing, this one adds the colour

values of two photos together.



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B.3.2 Alternation Processes

These all work in similar ways, taking sections of two images and displaying them alternately(flips does this with one image reflected on itself.) These were developed with an aim to

combine two photographs, while conserving individual areas of image data. Creating regular

patterns between the two images. While these could in theory be created through a variety

of traditional or digital photographic processes, with the repetitive and exact nature of the

sections, they are ideally suited to a programming based environment.

Figure B.9: Checker: Level 1 Variation Figure B.10: Checker: Level 12 Variation

Checker

int k = ((vari*2)-1)*10;

for(int i=0; i


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}

This creates a checkerboard pattern between two images, the variation is increased to in-

crease the size of the squares.

Figure B.11: Alternate: Level 1 Variation Figure B.12: Alternate: Level 12 Variation

Alternate

int k = vari*vari;

for(int i=0; i


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Figure B.13: Flipped: Level 1 Variation Figure B.14: Flipped: Level 12 Variation

Flip

int k = vari*vari;

pushMatrix();

scale(-1,

digital photo recycler thesis

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