From Damien Frost, the creator … I seem to have this uncanny knack for finding discarded photos and notes and like a lot of other people, once i’ve picked up these things to examine in passing i find it hard to throw it away again, as if by finding it you have gained some sort of responsibility over the object and if indeed it was originally accidentally lost you feel you should by finding it, at least give it a good home. My good home used to be a mantlepiece or a shoe box, until one night while browsing the web i came across an “error 404 Object not found” message and it got me thinking about all these “lost” web pages that are not “found” and how it might be analogous to all these real world pages/photos that i have actually found.

I’m not interested in the inherent value of the object itself but rather i’m more interested in presenting these things in a different context than originally intended. And i don’t neccesarily mean that they are now these digitally presented and preserved entities, but rather their audience and by extension their meaning has significantly changed by their presentation on the web. One of the things i enjoy most about finding photos is attaching a personal meaning to them. I don’t think we can help but try to do this when we look at a found image. Whether we are trying to determine the relationship between the subjects in the images of family snaps or trying to work out just why a seemingly random or mundane image was deemed worthy of posterity in a photo. But really there’s no telling. And this fascinates me, especially in the context of art where we’re often handed down definitive meanings especially by art critics of what’s going on in an artwork or photo that can often leave little room for the viewer to attach their own meaning to a work.

Pattern is described as an artistic or decorative design, the abstract quality shared by entities that have been produced from a template according to a set of rules, which govern characteristics such as self similarity, repetition and variation. A visual pattern includes not only shapes or forms but also the spaces between them. Some patterns, including decorative patterns such as stripes and zigzags, are so present as to be named. In addition to static patterns, there are patterns of movement, for example, oscillation.

Patterns may be observed at varying scales throughout nature and the built environment: cellular organisation, aerial photography, circuitboards, fingerprints, mathematics, poetry, Islamic art, coral reefs, architecture, crystals, handwriting.

The need for a point of reference … is it macrophotography of lichen on a granite outcrop, or an aerial photograph of a rock-covered landscape?

Fractals are perceptually infinite, mathematical patterns. Is all of life, if viewed from far enough away, really a perceptually infinite pattern? Can we fall into it like Alice down the rabbit hole?