Penny Space

Pennies are meant to be non unique. They are worth exactly one cent because it was decided that they be worth exactly one cent. They are the smallest form of currency in America, and so much be thought of as entirely homogeneous and uniform. In reality though, pennies are anything but. We’ve al experinced getting for change a particularily grimy penny, maybe corroded, maybe green, maybe scratched up and tarnished, then, after taking a quick glance at its year dropping it in a tip jar on in a pant pocket, never to see the light of day again. We don’t generally get the chance to see the entire visual space pennies can occupy, and appreciate their weirdnesses and differences across their entire aesthetic spectrum. Hence, Penny Space.

 

I scanned 1149 pennies with a high resolution scanner, wrote python scripts to crop them, embed them into vectors, and dimension reduce those vectors into the 2D grid you see above.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18HjtfdaTxEtqxDTBvWk1kZXjHNxAikwF/view?usp=drive_link

I was also able to extract the years from the pennies using OCR

 

here are some nice pennies

 

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