Elliot Anderson, a software engineer turned new-media artist, has taken tourist photos uploaded to the Web and turned them into works of digital art.
First, he built a search engine to mine the Web for "tagged" photos of places like Niagara Falls, Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon. Then he used software to create a composite image for each destination in the form of a translucent film image. Finally, he placed the film in a lightbox--an encasement that highlights the negative with a fluorescent light--to show off the layered effect that comes from creating a composite image, or the "average" viewpoint, Anderson says. The resulting image creates a layered vision of the original photos that looks a bit like an Impressionist painting.
Here's a digital composite of Yellowstone Falls from his installation, Average Landscapes, on display in San Francisco's de Young Museum through May.
"This image captures the consistent focus of the tourist eye onto the falls of Yellowstone Canyon," Anderson says. "Notice the people standing on the cliff above the falls in the upper right corner of the image.
Photo by Elliot Anderson
