Since the invention of the camera, millions of photographs have been captured, thousands of which have been lost, forgotten, or destroyed.
Yet that number pales in comparison to those that have yet to be conceived. With the advent of digital editing, our ability to generate visual content has multiplied exponentially. However, what percentage of all possible compositions have been created? How many remain undiscovered?
Using a brute-force algorithm that tests every possible color combination on a 1920 x 1080 pixel canvas, this work systematically traverses all possible images. Every frame from every film ever made, from those that do not yet exist, and even those that will never be imagined, will inevitably appear within the logical sequence of this progression. Borges, in The Library of Babel, wrote:
"From these incontrovertible premises, he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-something orthographic symbols (a number which, although vast, is not infinite)."
The total number of possible combinations is not infinite, but its magnitude is difficult to conceptualize: 2^16,588,800. If we had begun traversing this sequence at the dawn of the universe, we would still have seen only 0.1% of all possible configurations.
The dreams I remember and write down in hopes of recovering their mental images will one day be generated by a simple sequence of computational instructions.
The application includes a "time travel" function that allows users to enter a specific date and preview the composition that will be generated at that moment. This feature helps to grasp the scale of the sequence: for example, within the next 10,000 years, only the first three pixels on the screen will change color.