Scenarios of Sameness

A group of 1000 people is assembled at a beach to take a photograph of a sunset, many with the same cameras. All the images are printed and framed and shown in an exhibition.

Where can the art be found in images of essentially the same thing? This is what is happening on social media.

On the Twitter reading group about the W.G. Sebald book The Rings of Saturn, people have said they are not seeing what other people see in the book, or even the significance of crowd-sourcing an interpretation. That's what art is by definition: seeing what everyone is seeing in a retinal sense, i.e. signals are received on the optic nerve but are expressed in many different ways that sometimes look alike, or wind up that way. What artists might be after is a completely unique perspective, but ultimately make things to blend in.

See: Reconstructing the view with 1000 shared pictures. (In this case, the printer is the artist because it was (then) a unique perspective about what everyone saw: shades of orange and blue, hot and cold, sun and space.

---

This also relates, replacing pieces of music with photographs/cameras:

"While there are inevitably differences in the way that an individual perceives a recording of a given performance and separate occasions, it is also fascinating to consider how different renditions of a piece related to a person‘s perception and memory of the work in question. As a preliminary step, we need to consider why it is that different interpretations of the piece are not only possible, but inevitable and, indeed, desirable (for If every rendition of the work we’re to be identical, then the need for continued live performances will largely be obviated)".