“Signal to Noise” by Nick Bratton

Title:

Signal to Noise

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2014-2015

Medium:

Computer Program

Artist Statement:

Signal to Noise archives pixels extracted from images found on the hosting service imgur. com. Images of memes, ads, porn, landscapes, and cats all live together on imgur’s servers. Navigation to any image requires appending a random five, six, or seven character file path to the address imgur.com/. Signal to Noise navigates the site’s servers to find a random collection of images as quickly as possible. Pixels at specified locations are copied from their parent images and archived, contextualizing the site’s visual data not by web address, thematic content, or popularity but by time and space. An accompanying booklet of saturation-sorted pixel archives offers an alternative arrangement of the site’s content.