Data Portraits – background information and information in the background
V. Carpaccio's Portrait of a young woman rendered as a Data Portrait
(Preamble)
QR codes are images of data. They are digital entities that reside on analog materials. Furthermore, you can embed any kind of data you want in them (thank you Denso Wave!) up to 7kb numeric. I wanted to make images with these images of data. Not an image inside one bar code, but an image made up of thousands of bar codes each with discreet data. These images would contain the visual information that we interpret as humans, and they could also store a substantial amount of data that could only be interpreted by machines. The image (or actually, the material the image is printed on) is suddenly a random access floppy disk, a browser, a tracking device, a vehicle for presenting dense layers of intersecting information, and some of this information must be excavated with machines. This is where the idea for Data Portraits starts. …read more