🖼️

FramedPicture.Gallery is a virtual space about virtual spaces. Specifically, it's about seeing the way virtual spaces dictate what we see.

In the digital world, there are only numbers. These numbers are meaningless until the moment they are mediated for us by some digital platform, where they become pixels in an image, samples in sound, or text characters in a doc. Sometimes this process is very direct: a series of incremental values becomes an image of a gradient, a series of oscillating values becomes the sound of a sine wave. Other times the numbers pass through various layers with different stakeholders before becoming information.

Some of these layers have pragmatic concerns, "Does the user need to see every shade of blue in this image? Let's remove a few so that the image loads faster." Other layers have political concerns, "Does the user need to see this post? Let's display this one instead, they tend to engage more when we upset them."

One of the numbers you will find in the digital world is 128444. As a sound sample this value is too short to be audible, as an image pixel it's a somewhat transparent royal blue color. In a document or message it usually manifests as the Framed Picture emoji... but a framed picture of what? This is a decision entirely left to our information mediators. This gallery is a collection of the ways various platforms have decided to interpret the value 128444 as of May 25 2020. —Nick Briz