Nearest Neighbor Interpolation Artist Statement
When I first saw images from the NASA mars expeditions, I found them to be strangely familiar. I was immediately reminded of places that I had been in the desert west with similar characteristics. I also noticed that NASA was using some of the same techniques that I had been working on in my own photography to assemble multiple images into a panoramic view. The stark beauty of the barren Martian landscape made me want to return to those places here on Earth where I had experienced a similar feeling of wonder at an otherworldly landscape.
The title of the show refers to both Mars as our neighboring planet and to a process used in digital imaging to guess the value of picture information that was not actually sampled. While not the most accurate method of interpolation, Nearest Neighbor is computationally efficient and useful when you are not concerned with detail accuracy. My comparison of western desert landscape with Mars is not intended to be accurate or convincing. It is more of a method of coming to know and appreciate what is before us by comparing it with something foreign. I have always loved the desert landscape and thought of it as an escape to a place so different from where I live, even like traveling to another world. The idea of going to Mars for a family picnic may seem impossible to us now but things can change at an alarming rate. Before the invention of photography just one hundred sixty-six years ago, a description of the process by which these images were made would have been met with as much unbelief. I am not suggesting that travel to Mars will ever be commonplace but I do wish to celebrate the imagination and vision that has produced the technology possible to send rovers to Mars and to make digital images.
My panoramic images are made from either twenty-four or thirty-six separate images stitched together to form a 360o view. They are captured with a digital camera and processed in various image-editing applications then printed on a pigmented ink printer. The unusual view of the landscape that the rolled out panoramic print provides is intentional. I like to see the landscape in print in a different way than you see it when you are there. The panoramic views are the collective record of taking in multiple vantage points over time. This forms a more complete view of a place but at the same time distorts it into something that is quite different from spatial reality. The interpretation of landscape is the goal rather than an accurate depiction.