To say that under a regime of the digital, the photograph has become "dubious," as Peter Lunenfeld has, still does not account fully for the ontological change that photography has undergone. The gross manipulability of the photograph is actually that which is most clearly understood and commonly remarked on. In this work, I try to follow some implications of the pixel for the digital image.
From the perspective of computation, the pixel is color and location as numerical data and at the level of expression, it enters into the symbolic, it is, in Flusser's terms, a significant surface.
Here I play at the hinge of these views on image. Two images are manipulated in relation to each other so that all the pixels in each are rearranged to resemble its other. No pixels have been deleted, nor have their colors been changed. Their location has simply been rearranged.
The process is computationally intensive requiring each pixel to be compared to every other one amounting to billions and billions of operations for an image only 1000 pixels square; this can take hours, or even days.
Consider the images shown here in pairs. So, for example, the first image makes a portrait of the green and gold hues of a still life with tomatillos, which, in its turn, is rendered from the the flesh tones of a man's face.