Mountain – Rewriting the Encoding

This series concerns the relationship between the JPEG data structure that underlies digital photography and the image once captured within it.

A JPEG does not record the image itself, but the mixing ratios from which the image is assembled — for each 8×8 pixel block, an instruction for how to blend 64 kinds of frequency patterns. What we see as a photograph is only a figure reassembled anew each time it is viewed.

When the ordering of that JPEG data, or the rules of its reconstruction, are rewritten, geometric patterns that could not exist in the original image appear — the displacement of fragments, shifts in luminance and color.

The JPEG structure itself is raised into an image; how it surfaces upon the captured image is designed anew for each work.