The Art of Removal

Tourist Remover is an online app that can remove moving objects from your vacation snapshots. It does so by comparing several photos from the same angle and removing whatever isn't common to all photos (see above).

Removing unwanted folks from photos has a long tradition:



The tourist photo that jumped to my mind is Francis Alÿs's Turista (1996). So this morning I photoshopped No Turista (2009):


Here's a thumbnail animation of the alteration:


Andy Baio recently posted Meme Scenery on his blog in which he removes the people from 23 famous Internet photos/videos:


Baio points to Jon Haddock's Internet Sex Photos as inspiration:


An earlier work in the same vein is Naomi Uman's Removed (1999) in which she removed a writhing, naked woman from a soft-core porn film. Uman also create Touch My Body (De-Mariahed) in response to Oliver Laric’s Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) (2008).

Neils Bonde's Bad Days series involves painting out scenes of tragedy and pain from newspaper clippings. I admire the non-digital-ness of his process:


And of course mention must be made of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953):


Addendum, 7/23/09: To this round up I'd also add Desiree Palmen's camouflage work

The Small Glass (after Duchamp)

It was an inadvertent intervention... but I like it (and it does still work).

Doodle: I Sing the Body Electronic

I was thinking about yesterday's posting and am still mulling over doing something with automated translation. My instinct that it isn't right for a Firefox add-on remains, but perhaps doing something a little more shaped.

I was thinking of doing a chapbook of Leaves of Grass in auto-translation. Here's the beginning of "I Sing the Body Electric" as Walt Whitman wrote it:

I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

And here it is translated into Greek, then Korean, and then back into English:

I sing the body electric;
Who loved me and that their army engirth engirth;
I could smash them, they do not want to see
And, end with discorrupt and is responsible for the soul.

That's hide the bodies of suspected corruption;
Mutilate the dead and the people who live with a bad case, What is it to clean?
In some cases, the body and the soul does not?
If you do not have the soul and the body, soul What is it?

I think this doesn't work. The problem is that what I like about the auto-translation is the sense of poetry that emerges... Using poetry as the starting point undermines the emergence of poetic language. I'm going to keep working on this idea.

Doodle 2: Infinite Subway

I did this doodle as a way to learn SketchUp (Google's 3D modeling tool).

Doodle 1: Dots

Most of my artworks are long-drawn out affairs that I spend months making. So I'm introducing a series of doodles; sketches that take a few moments (or days or weeks) to do. This first one is found art. It's an image file from an online Risk-like game that I'm playing:


Here are the dots in context: