Shannon Ha – Looking Outwards 02

Mitchel Whitelaw’s generative art piece, Succession, is a documentation of ‘digital fossils’ that represent the history and growth of the city of Newcastle. What I admire most about this piece of work is that it manages to use an incredibly simple algorithm to convey the complexity of its subject, which centers around visualizations of the city’s role in Britain’s industrialization. 

The algorithm is able to condense the representation of Newcastle’s culture by using two thousand images sourced by Flickr commons, then it uses these images to generate composite images using HTML Canvas. The generative process uses 5 randomly selected images and then placed into a frame using semi-random rules for positioning. This creates a palimpsest effect as the opacity of all the images are low and the layers of images seem to work as a whole and by itself at the same time.

 The indistinguishable boundaries between layers synthesizes the different walks of life, ranging from economy to architecture, that make up the city of Newcastle, and essentially preserves it through the IDs and permalinks assigned to these composites.