All Thumbs / 48x48 | Frontier Nerds

Overview

An interface to navigate every possible 48 x 48 pixel black and white image. The software presents a complete, navigable spatial map of each of the 2^48×48 images, from solid white at the top-left of the map to solid black in the bottom-right.

Four means of navigating the possibility space are provided:

Direct panning through the space.
“Teleportation” to other points in the space through a compressed mini-map
Direct entry of a specific image number.
Camera-based navigation in which the live feed from a camera jumps to the matching point in the map.

The project is intended to explore the implications of digital quantization on representation, originality / creativity, and functionally infinite vs. truly infinite data sets. The camera interface, in particular, suggests that one truly “takes” a photo from a predetermined and bounded possibility space — one does not “create” a photo ex nihilo. Some actions which we casually classify as creative are in fact collisions with, curations of, or temporal accelerations through information which already exists.

A 48 x 48 pixel 1-bit image was selected as the subject for the sake of computational expedience, and also because it’s around the perceptual threshold required to convey semantically meaningful content. Technical — not conceptual — constraints prevent this technique from being applied to much larger images.