Media and Performance

Using the Situationist International’s concept of the dérive, an unplanned journey through a landscape with the goal of creating Situations, I explore the importance of quotidian images via web-scraping in my IMG_[4 digits] project. By scraping Flickr for images from different users, all titled with the same default file name, one can encounter images that would not otherwise come to the surface on an internet that’s guided by algorithms that direct users to encounter more of the same. What was once an open terrain for exploration has become a commodity-driven landscape where browser’s identities are captured via data mining, and their subjectivities sold back to themselves in the form of predictive advertising. The images found using this searching practice are Poor Images (Hito Steyerl), and as such “show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable” (Steyerl, 2009).

At the Dataset Farmers Market hosted at LARPA in December 2024, I sold USB sticks filled with 1,000 images, each individual drive holding photos with the same default file name. Buyers would choose a random number from my stock, and receive 1,000 surprising encounters to be explored at their leisure.