This image was created by blending 50 photos in Flickr all tagged with “the gates” (the program was devised by brevity). You can see the complete set of images here. Try guessing the tag for each image – I found that, even though they are quite abstract, there are ghostly traces of shape and line that quietly announce themselves. It sort of whispers to you.
There is often a kind of ethereal beauty in network maps. They resemble something living, fibrous, arterial. Brevity’s program achieves something rather different. It takes pictures – fragments of experience – and mixes them like a painter mixes pigments. The resulting colors and textures are reminiscent of deep, subconscious urges, like the color field paintings of Rothko, or Ad Reinhardt (thanks Alex). It portrays a kind of experiential network.

This was posted yesterday on the Gates Memory Blog, the discussion forum for our project (in collaboration with Flickr), “The Gates: An Experiment in Collective Memory.”