Forty years seperate the events captured in these images, one from May 1968 Paris and the other from November 2011 New York. The pixels from each have been rearranged to approximate the image of the other.
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.
The constraints of drawing with an antiquated plotter include the difficulty of drawing anything but straight lines. So to represent photographic images took some creativity. This software draws random lines in a density inversely proportionate to the light density of each area in the photograph.
There is a new archive of photography, and the photograph itself is changed. The archive is the structured columnar accumulation of endless banality to which any- and everyone contributes, and from which we all can also retrieve at will, and through those same worn channels, not just the singular image, but a stream of categorical similitude.
