When AllGoRhythms

Long before kids had smartphones to play with, we had very simple plastic toys that kept us busy at least for an initial few days. One that I remember was the Sliding Puzzle, where one had to slide little numbers around to put them back in correct sequential order.

Several years ago, in 2012 I had the idea to apply this concept to photographs randomly selected from my archive. I created an algorithm in Photoshop to split a black and white photograph into various rectangles and then offset them several times until I was visually satisfied. 2012 was long after civilization was already drowning in images. In his masterpiece “8 ½ “ Federico Fellini had already made that observation in 1963. So people had become adept at quickly reading an image, even a complex one. My goal was to shuffle an image around, forcing the reader to try to reassemble it, perhaps not literally as in the Sliding Puzzle, but to reconstruct the gist of it in their mind. It was also a tactic to have them actually look, and spend a bit more time than if it was in its original form. After the first step was completed, I applied yet another algorithm that added an layer of color rectangles mismatched over the rectangles of the image.