It’s difficult to figure out exactly how to label Robert Silvers, but perhaps the term “techno artist” fills the bill.
For Silvers, a computer and photographs are like a brush and paint were to Georges Seurat.
An amateur photographer and computer programmer, Silver developed a software program that enables him to make digital pointillist-like images out of thousands of tiny photographs, a method he calls Photomosaics.
Viewed from a distance, the pictures reveal a large image — a flamingo or an owl, Abraham Lincoln or Princess Diana — while up close the individual photographs that comprise it become apparent.
Newsweek commissioned him to create a mosaic of Diana for its pictures-of-the-year issue last December. He composed the image of the late princess from photos of flowers.
The year before, Life magazine asked for a mosaic to commemorate its 60th anniversary. Marilyn Monroe’s face was chosen, and all the previous Life covers formed the image. A picture of actor David Cassidy forms the beauty mark on her face, and Paul and Linda McCartney are part of her right eye. Ernest Hemingway is visible in the shadows under her chin.
Silvers also created a poster of Jim Carrey for “The Truman Show” and an image of golfer Tiger Woods for the cover of Sports Illustrated. His image of Abraham Lincoln, composed of Civil War photographs of generals, battlefields and injured soldiers, has been the best-selling poster of all time for the Library of Congress.
A selection of Silvers’ work is on exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry through Jan. 3.
Silvers, 29, developed Photomosaics while he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famed Media Lab. He had majored in computer science as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts and, after graduation, went to work for Nynex Science & Technology, where he helped develop video-conferencing and interactive television.
With that experience under his belt, Silvers decided the time was right to pursue a master’s degree at MIT. On a Motorola fellowship, he worked on many projects at MIT, but thought the mosaic idea was so promising he chose it as his thesis project.
Even in its early stages, it was so successful that the day after he got his degree in June 1997 he started his own company, Runaway Technology. It was financed by “a little bit of money” from the commissions he got during graduate school. Silvers now sells custom-made images to publications, companies and individuals. He also licenses images to merchandisers for posters and puzzles.
The buzz about Silvers started in 1995 after he made a mosaic image of a former MIT president for the school’s Media Lab newsletter. Someone from Wired magazine saw it and quickly commissioned him to do a portrait of Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte for the cover of the magazine’s October 1995 issue.
Then someone from The Stock Market, a New York photo agency, saw the Wired cover and asked Silvers to do a cover for the agency’s special catalog of images reflecting America’s culturally diverse population. Silvers made a mosaic of the Statue of Liberty’s face composed of photographs from the agency’s archive.
And that led to the commission for the cover of Life’s 60th anniversary issue in 1996.
Silvers, on the phone from his home base in Cambridge, Mass., said his original inspiration came in 1991 when he saw a portrait made of sea shells by Ken Knowlton, a scientist and artist.
“I thought it was really cool because there’s an image on two different levels,” he said. “You only see the shells close up and you only see the face from far away.
“I’ve been a photographer since childhood and I stated thinking about images on multiple scales, but I didn’t have the photo collection or the computer resources back then.”
Silvers has registered the term Photomosaics as a trademark and he also has applied for a patent on part of his computer program.
“I really want to emphasize that if someone else had my software, the images they would make would be completely different, just like two different photographers with a camera or two different painters with a paint brush,” he said.
“I wrote my software to do what I would do by hand, except that it would take a lot more time. I didn’t write (it) to be easy for others to use.”
After Silvers scans photos into the computer, his program sorts the images by color, density and texture. But he said he put features into the program that allow him “ultimate control.”
“For example, if I don’t like the way any given tile looks, perhaps because of its subject close up or from far away because it stands out to the eye as being a defect, I can click on that tile and the computer will suggest dozens of likely alternatives,” he said.
“Then I ultimately choose the final tile. I’ll do that (to) as much as a third of the images in the mosaic.”
Silvers also has to choose what kind of photos will make up an image, a selection that also may serve to make a commentary or otherwise add to its meaning, the way the Newsweek image of Diana composed of flowers echoed the outpouring of public grief that followed her unexpected death.
For a portrait of Microsoft mogul Bill Gates that is included in Silvers’ book, “Photomosaics” (Henry Holt, 1997), Silvers bought paper currency from around the world and spent weeks scanning in the bills, then cropping and preparing the images.
He said that he may make “20 or 30 versions” of a mosaic, pick the one he likes best and then start over, making another 20 versions of his selected image.
“I do it kind of genetically to see what survives my test, so it’s a long, intricate process, not just like a push-button thing,” he said.
Since Silvers does not take the photographs that make up his composite images, but rather produces pictures of pictures, can he be considered an artist? And what is the boundary between artist and technician, art and technology?
Peter Gena, professor and chair of the art and technology department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, notes that the idea of pictures of pictures isn’t new, citing the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a 16th Century Milanese artist who painted portraits composed of fruits, vegetables, fish and game.
“Arcimboldo was claimed as an ancestor by the Surrealists, and what you would argue in this work is that Silvers would have precedents in Surrealism, in the superimposed, juxtaposed images,” Gena said.
As for the element of technology, Gena said: “We’re at the point now where the medium is part of the aesthetic. It would be naive to assume it’s not art mainly because he uses technology. . . . The computer is useless without a programmer, so that is part of the compositional process.”
For his part, Silvers said, “I’ve always been a photographer, so at least I’m a photographer that has spent a lot of time making fine-art photography images. So I guess I am an artist and also a computer programmer and scientist.”
“(But) that’s a different question than, Are Photomosaics art? I would say that Photomosaics are a medium. When photography started, people didn’t think it was art. Painters were, like, that’s not art, you’re just capturing reality. Where is the creativity in that?
“In fact, in the early days of photography, people were just working on the process of capturing an image, and they didn’t spend as much time on the content of it.”
Similarly, Silvers said, when he was first developing Photomosaics he was thinking about how he could make an image out of other images that would look realistic.
“But once the medium was created and I proved to myself that the technology was developed, then I started to think about content and putting messages in it,” Silver said.
“So Photomosaics can’t be defined as either art or not art. It’s just a medium, but it’s certainly a rich enough medium that you can make art in it.”
