This series started as a desire to create poster-sized prints of some of my early digital photos (circa 2005). Digital photography was in its infancy at the time, so these images are fairly low resolution. Simply printing them without modification results in visible pixellation at large sizes. Rather than attempt to hide the information lost to the inadequacies of the technology, I decided to emphasize the images’ digital origins.
To accomplish this, I used a uniquely digital process — the ubiquitous JPEG compression algorithm — to intentionally discard additional information. (This idea was shamelessly stolen from Neil Freeman.) The resulting images are compressed at the lowest quality that the ImageMagick convert tool would allow, but rendered at very high resolutions. This allows the compression artifacts to generate additional pixels beyond those in the low-resolution source material.
