This wall covered with bottlecaps decorates the patio of a bar in Brooklyn. It appealed to me because this wall is a raster image: the bottlecaps are pixels that together communicate a pattern, an organized set of visual information. I also appreciate that the bottlecaps are organized into discrete square units. However, I felt I needed to play with the organizational system. Combining techniques used in IMG_0272, IMG_0302, and IMG_0330, I excavated the photograph in regular units and sub-units, reconfiguring the patterns that the bottlecaps create.

I also chose to capture the image in its 'in progress' state in Photoshop: given the themes of this project, there's no reason to privilege the image as product. Just as in an actual excavation where the site grid extends beyond the scope of any particular photograph, here the blue guides that define my units extend beyond the edges of the image. Surely it is more 'real' to show the mechanics of the process than to pretend that it happened all by itself as a fetishized final product. This is a concern that I had throughout this project, is indeed why I explained the steps I took to create each image, but here it is summarized neatly in the image itself.

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