Erik Adigard
The wide adoption of social media is bringing a new kind of iconographic explosion and is redefining image as we know it. Being continually captured by shutter-happy and Twitter-happy crowds, the Colosseum is arguably the most interesting subject to express this phenomenon. It is aggregated into a cloud of impressions and pictorial fragments—more than 3.5 million images indexed by Google. Not unlike a quantum state, these images are not fixed; they can be copied, edited, shared, or sold. Along with two secondary subjects, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and the Pantheon, I propose to investigate the nature of this explosion and then consider how it affects the essence of image, as well as the culture and economy that it generates.