Looking through An Ad Window
“Coin of the Realm” shows what an iPhone depicts when an advertisement is between it and the view. Instagram once tagged it branded content.
It’s a series of photographs taken under varying conditions of motion, obstruction, and chance. There are more than two sides to this coin.
I make these photos in transit, through the window of a bus whose exterior is covered with a see-through ad. The unaltered output is a fusion of documentation and abstraction that I can’t foresee or repeat. As the vehicle moves, light, speed, and shifting vantage points continually affect what the camera registers and effectively confuse its software. Without deliberate composition or framing, my decision-making is minimized, and the process is largely procedural. It’s more harvest than shoot.
Here, everyday seeing is intensified. Mindful that the observer affects the observation and that what we see is contingent on how, when, and why we look, my practice is the pursuit of information in ambiguity, and ambiguity in information.
Showing this work to a digital camera designer, they described it as computational photography, not AI. My iPhone uses iOS 18.1, software released in 2024 which Apple’s press release mentions admitted potential for “unreliability and hallucinations1“. Thanks for the clarification.
In 2022, an earlier iPhone operating system would output this curtain-like, penny tile effect shown below.
- A digital camera creator and photography expert doesn’t consider this effect AI, calling it computational.
- “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.