Diaries #59

This project started with a broken camera. Over the summer, I spent a few months in a small house on the coast, immersed in nature. While I was there, the camera on my phone stopped working properly. The pictures were sometimes overexposed, distorted or out of focus. Intrigued by this optical effect, I started experimenting with the camera, taking pictures of plants and nature.

Photographing the sunlight became my pleasure and my obsession. The bright light reacted to the broken camera shutter and left traces of interesting textures on the sensor. Most of the time I'd come home not knowing what to expect from the pictures. It's a feeling I remember from developing film in the darkroom, where it's often hard to predict what the end result will be. This happy accident made me think about that feeling. I was fascinated by the unexpected distortions, and a generative series of photographs seemed like the ideal medium to explore that sense of surprise and discovery. A generator of happy accidents.

A digital darkroom, behind the scenes, is operated by a random algorithm that further processes the images, using a vocabulary of visual alterations borrowed from both the digital and analog worlds. When a new piece is minted, the pictures are altered, mixed, and distorted in unpredictable ways. Through this process, the images become more abstract, feeling at once surreal and familiar, universal and specific, very obvious and enigmatic. In a way, the visual qualities of the images evokes the elusive feeling of a distant memory.

The project will also include an accompanying text for each piece. Artificial intelligence has generated hundreds of imaginary travelogues with the prompt of describing a day spent on the coast. These fragments are drawn from our collective memory, which, like the images, are traces of something experienced by all of us and by no one in particular. These travelogues may look real, but when you look closer there's something off about them. It's interesting to explore that sense of ambiguity. The fictional story is part of the token and when visited in live view, the text is revealed by clicking on the image.

The work is presented in the format of a standard 35mm camera print (4×6 inches) with a date stamp on it that closely resembles the one impressed on vacation photos by cheap snapshot cameras. The date, in this case, is tied with the time in which the photo is minted, like a souvenir of the day when the memory was captured on the Ethereum blockchain.