Richárd Kiss - PLA.net

PLA.net is a book that is intended to cover the countries of the world, like a conventional, illustrated world atlas. However, unlike the usual way, it does not contain pictures, maps and data about countries, but rather online representations of these areas, a collection of many photographs.

These images, representing the countries of our planet, are generated by algorithmic averaging of millions of photographs uploaded to the web for each country. To do this, a dedicated algorithm downloads and averages the total number of photographs uploaded from each country on the planet from an Internet photo-sharing portal, without any post-composition or manual intervention. There is only one subjective step in the image processing: a constant contrast coefficient, which allows better visualisation of these algorithmic images. Depending on the size of the countries, the time taken to create the images can vary from a few hours to several weeks, and the resulting visual essences provide an unconventional way of seeing the countries of our planet.

In the set of pictorial condensations, the boundaries become blurred, the canonised pictorial symbols and prefigurations are replaced by colours and tones. In the four hundred page book you will find all the countries of the world, organised by the web domains they use. An appendix containing each domain-country pair is included at the end of the book.

2018

Video of the photobook