Tuesday, 30 April 2019

Lorem Ipsum but for images

David Marby & Nijiko Yonskai's Lorem Picsum is an online service that generates placeholder images. All you have to do is write image URLs like so — https://picsum.photos/400/300 — with the folder names defining the image dimensions.

Part of the utility of lorem ipsum, however, is that the text consists of real words and sentences, but jumbled up. This means it has the dimensions of real text, but no meaning to distract the typesetter or designer from its form. Latin having similar dimensions to English, lorem ipsum has only improved for this purpose with the decline of Latin.

It seems to me, then, that the garbled reality of deep-dream images is more appropriate than the meaningful stock photos used here. Perhaps I'm just encouraging the world to be more completely filled with nightmares? Some of these AI-mediated works are quite lovely.