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I started taking these pictures while watching television on a stormy day. As the blustery weather outside fractured the weak TV transmission signal, I took a series of shots with my iPhone camera. I wondered if I'd end up with a clash of digitalizations by capturing an LCD screen with a smart phone camera. Sure enough, when individually frozen, the fleeting images revealed chunky blocks of pixels and fans of moiré curves. But they also displayed color palettes and abstractions that brought modern artworks to mind.
Perplexed at what underlay the break-up of the TV transmission into these intriguing jumbles, I showed the pictures to my husband, an engineer. “What's happening?” I asked. “What makes the pictures look this way?”
His first attempt to give me a precise technical explanation left me confused, but as I urged him to describe the phenomenon in ever simpler terms, he finally told me, “You've captured the heart of the algorithm.”