1. For the Siemens exhibition, the images on display have been produced from a selection of photo caption texts taken from two newspapers, The New York Times and Die Zeit.



















































2. Alfred Stieglitz, An American Seer, Dorothy Norman, Random House, 1973, page 161.














3.,4. "The Richter Scale of Blur", Gertrud Koch, October 62 magazine, MIT Press, 1992, pages 137, 139.





5. See The Cult of Information, Theodore Roszak, Pantheon Books, 1986, pages 14-15.

For the definitive reference on Information Theory see:
The Mathematical Theory of Communication,
Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, University of Illinois,
Urbana, 1949.
   The Equivalents II
George Legrady © 1995

"The word "money"now refers to a configuration of oxides on a tape stored in the computer department of a bank. This relationship is purely arbitrary, revealing its socially constituted character... the representational aspect of " money"is sustained through language."

 Mark Poster, The Mode of Information




Equivalents II is an installation artwork that features an interactive computer program which produces abstract, cloud-like images in real-time when text is entered into the computer. Viewers are invited to generate images by typing in their own phrases, comparing them with the wall-displayed images.1

The intent in this work has been to situate software design within the context of contemporary art discourse, specifically as it relates to processes initially introduce into art discourse through the conceptual art movement. The project was influenced by models borrowed from semiotics and linguistics with a particular focus on the practice of "reading" or assigning meaning in the relation between images and texts. Just as the production of a conventional image entails technical expertise and aesthetic choices defined by ideological beliefs and personal desire, this work aims to contextualize computer programming practice in particular the focus on algorithmic implementations as an arena of creative authorship.


The Equivalents II program uses a fractal algorithm to generate tonal complexity and the initial tone control parameters are set by the viewer's phrase, each text resulting in a particular image. The procedure consists of the viewer typing a phrase into the program. The image creation takes place in real-time, beginning with transforming the screen image into a symmetrical grid of a 2 x 2 matrix of grey tones. The grey segments then subdivide into smaller parts, continuously subdividing down to the pixel level, transforming the 2 x 2 grid into a complex textured image resembling the fluid form of a cloud. Each phrase generates its own image. The correlation between typed text and image produced is numerically defined, and therefore specific to each text. For the sake of play, I introduced a transformative element into the process by which the viewer can subvert the algorithms' normal functioning. Certain words stored in a databank were given deterministic influences. When these words are encountered they trigger disruptions, increasing the image's tonal complexity. The database words have been selected from the following sources: J.G Ballard's Crash, Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, a sampling of computer slang words selected from the Hacker's Dictionary, gender labeling and identification, TV Talk show vocabulary, and also words that describe positive and negative attitudes. When these words are encountered, the normal sequencing of tonal values shift, or they are brightened, or darkened, thereby introducing anomalies into the image's unfolding. In the upgraded version of the software, these keywords are available through a pulldown menu that also lists the word's influence on the image.

At the completion of the drawing phase, the viewer is presented with a final image, followed by the option to view other phrases entered by previous viewers which contain matching words with the current viewer's text. The intention behind this textual addition is to confront the viewer with the realization that words like elements within a syntactic order shift in meaning depending on their context.

In his early writings on photography, Roland Barthes has argued that the text's dominance over the image came from language's coded structure overpowering the free flow of iconic signifiers. This discussion between denotative and connotative aspects of image and text is at the root of the Equivalents II project.

For the viewer, the act of entering a phrase to initialize the program becomes the means by which he or she is implicated into the work. This action is a loose form of 'meaning generating' process in that the viewer's typed phrase is the genetic blueprint for a particular image in the technical sense as mentioned earlier, but also becomes a form of personal investment on the viewer's part who is then committed to wait for the completed image, to see the product of his or her words. There is then the realization that the typed phrase does not literally shape the i image, illustrating the textual meaning but functions rather to provide a grounding, a form of investment by which the outcome of a particular image is correlated to a specific text. The relation between the typed text and the resultant image in Equivalents II exists on the level of the symbolic. The intent is to reveal through the experience of the interaction rather than to illustrate the text- to raise questions about how we assign meaning to things, how our languages are primarily symbolic representations coded over time whose meanings have evolved through usage and conventions.


A key historical reference for this work is Alfred Stieglitz's photographs of clouds, the Equivalents. Begun in 1922, at a time when pure abstraction emerged to defy any reference to the real in visual representation, Stieglitz produced a photographic body of work whose subject matter clouds, functioned purely on a metaphoric level:

"My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos.... Shapes, as such, do not interest me unless they happen to be an outer equivalent of something already taking form within me."2

Stieglitz referred to his abstract cloud images not in terms of what they were pictorially but rather for what they might imply -- a reflection of the artist's ordering of the world, an inscription of his emotional state, as well as a means to question the interpretive coding process of the observer and viewer.

Fifty years later, photography's 'apparent transparency as mirror of nature' and the whole range of representational conventions ascribed to its practice had become the dominant mode of representation in the 20th Century to the extent that its particular perceptual referents had become "naturalized" by redefining our vision to conform with the photographic model. In an article on the work of the painter Gerhard Richter, Gertrud Koch refers to this cultural phenomena of the photographic imprint as photography having now become "a part of the infinite semiotic chain of cultural signs" where "painters who painted after nature now paint after photographs."3 Koch further elaborates on the imprint of the photographic model on our perception of images, with a description of the half-tone process, the most commonly seen form of representation, which is basically a form of low-resolution technological sampling. She states:

"The half-tone signifies a presence even if it is a network of dots in which a known figure can only be discerned by someone who has a preexistent image stored away in his or her memory."4


In the way that the half-tone process can convincingly stand-in for a contiguous, tonal image, the Equivalents II project has evolved out of a long-term goal to mathematically produce believable still-images that convey the realism of the photographic. The program uses fractal and noise based algorithms in its aim to simulate real world behavior patterns. In their groundbreaking publication on Information Theory, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver redefined the term "information" to denote any communication, sensible or none5. In the relationship between signal and noise, signal was redefined to mean that which had a structure or order, and noise became the random, unintended or unpredictable interference that would accumulate through transmission events and eventually mutate the original signal. Even though noise may seem at first as an undesired symptom, scientists have relied extensively on introducing it into computational models to generate complexity and variations in the testing of theories. Controlled noise and randomness are used to simulate organic complexity to achieve the fluctuating textures we perceive in our natural environment such as ground and other surfaces, waves and clouds. But they are also found in the statistical studies of cultural topics such as demographic studies or economic analyses.

The intent to mathematically simulate blurred, photographic images led me to the use of a fractal computational algorithm titled random point displacement, mid- point fractal synthesis that can generate an organic tonal range resembling those of hills and valleys. When these hills and valleys are described visually as shades of grays between the maximum ranges of black and white, they can be adjusted to resemble the abstracted images of clouds. This resemblance to clouds, a known physical phenomena, asserts for us that there is meaning. And we project that meaning onto the image.


Equivalents II aims to test this threshold of cognitive perception and cultural interpretation. It considers the minimum condition under which a complex structured set of tonal gradations produced from mathematical algorithms can be p perceived as an authoritative image resembling the photographic. It asks the viewer to consider the cultural interpretive 'reading' processes we use to understand images, especially once they have entered the familiar discursive contexts of the photographic norm, cultural narratives, and the institutional framework of the gallery or art publication.

The project further aims to consider the discourse of simulated experiences - for instance, our reading of a mathematically constructed image that evokes the cultural and the sublime but exists as the pure result of a formula that does not have the capacity to express form, aesthetic resolution, poetics or beauty!

Text originally published in "Photography after Photography", exhibition catalog, edited by H.v.Amelunxen, isbn 90-5701-101-8, G+B Arts, Siemens Kulturprogramm, Munich, 1996, pp 216-221