Compressed Forests
Jan Robert Leegte
2016.
Website, Domain name: compressedforests.com
Collection: Pieter and Marieke Sanders, The Netherlands.

The sheer amount of (semi-)professional photographers flooding the Internet with images of landscapes has defused the romantic ideal of going in the field and capturing the Great Outdoors. The similar en plein air method of painting made famous by the impressionists is also obsolete, with numerous amateur courses offered, the genre of paintings to be the most generally appreciated.

Compressed Mountains attempts to reinvigorate this, by swapping the actors. The field painter is an algorithm visiting the databases of Flickr and venturing into the wild by randomly selecting images within queries. The algorithm then uses the same ubiquitous JPEG compression used by all web 2.0 services to manage the size of image files. Rather than optimising size, it compressed the file maximally, leaving the raw computational impression of a delocalised landscape.

Compressed Forests is browser-based work from the Compressed Landscapes series.

Jan Robert Leegte
www.leegte.org

The next artist showing is Lorna Mills, being invited by Jan Robert Leegte.