Pieces

Description

Pieces is a simple experiment in color, composition and context. It searches Flickr for a landscape from a given month of the year and displays three randomly selected portions of it. Refresh until something beautiful happens.

Technology

This visualization uses jQuery and the Flickr API. First, a random month is selected and a search is performed on Flickr for that month along with the word “landscape”. A random image is then chosen out of the first 1,000 results, which are sorted by a Flickr metric called “interestingness”. This photo is then displayed within three HTML “div” tags using the CSS property “background-image” along with random values for “background-position”.

Inspiration

Pieces was inspired by a pair of posts (one, two) by Heather Chen. I was attracted to the idea of a part vs. whole exploration within a single image, as well as how that relationship might (or might not) resonate with a simple, but loaded, concept such as a month of the year.

Credits

The images displayed are, of course, property of their copyright owners. A link to the original photo and its owner can be found at the bottom of the page. The photo pictured in the screenshot belongs to Nathan Bergeron Photography.