also known as Looking through An Ad Window.
“Coin of the Realm” shows what an iPhone depicts when an advertisement is between it and the view.
These photos are made through the window of a bus whose exterior is covered with an ad one can see through. Focussed on the ad’s dot pattern, the camera produces abundant and exuberant so-called malfunctions while rendering the scenery. These images are unaltered.
Showing what, and suggesting how the camera sees through a cloak of publicity, they suspend belief in objectivity, neutrality, and stability.
The closer one looks, the more difficult it is to decipher. This is information in ambiguity, and ambiguity in information. Incidentally, Instagram once tagged it branded content.
My iPhone uses iOS 18.1, software released in 2024 which includes Apple Intelligence enhancements (see what they did? AI.) with admitted potential for “unreliability and hallucinations1“. Have I made this work with AI? Not explicitly, nor directly. However, inadvertently, and apparently inescapably, it is present in the process.
In 2022, an earlier iPhone operating system output this curtain-like, penny tile effect shown below, offering different insight into its visual organizational principles, slightly more orderly yet still cryptic and vague.
- “Tim Cook: Apple Intelligence Isn’t Immune to Hallucinations,” PCMag.com, June 11, 2024.
- iOS 18 Features and Updates: Exploring the Amazing Redesigned Photos App, December 22, 2024. As of iOS 18.1, the software uses Apple Intelligence (i.e. AI) to enhance the camera output.