Looking Outwards 7

For this week, I chose to focus on Stamen’s project called “Getty Institute: Ed Ruscha’s Photo Archive”, a computational organization and documentation of Ed Ruscha’s photo archives of Los Angeles. These photographs were taken from a car-mounted camera, which when driven, would document the buildings and street views of Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. This documentation continued every few years, creating a dynamic record of the changing views of the street. 

The photos, however, were never digitized, which made it hard to visualize the change in the strip over time: hence the implication of the dynamic interface created. With the use of “AI-generated tags”, Stamen was able to sort through the photos and create an interface that allows the user to virtually “drive” through the street and visualize the change over time. The interface simultaneously shows multiple years of change stacked on top of each other as the user “drives” through the map that is sandwiched in the middle. One is also able to zoom or sort through specific photos with keywords. This project is therefore a combination of both the algorithms created that easily sorts and orders photos, and the ‘creative’ part of the interface that allows the user to drive the car.