Watermarks
2005 -
Giclée Prints
Watermarks is an ongoing series of digital photographs altered to include spam e-mail text that arrived in a prepared inbox at the same time as the photograph was taken (the color of the text being determined by sampling a color from the image).
The digital watermark is an increasingly common sight in web imagery, relating to attempts to assert claims of intellectual property and copyright within the current ecstatic production of digital images - as long ago as 2004 a Getty archivist estimated that more digital images were produced than in all the years beforehand combined (a steep adjunct to Moore's law of processing power).
Watermarks takes the metadata within the digital image that marks the exact timing of its production and charts it through the intermittently constant tempo of spam mail. In the case of the example below, the photos were taken at the same time, from the same position every day for four months and compared to the contents of a prepared inbox (an email account left deliberately exposed in public forums in order to attract spam). Where a message hadn't arrived at the same time as the photo was taken the image was discarded.
Sequence shot at 120 Broadway, New York