003: The Infinite Mosaic

"I just want a picture of a god-dang hot dog." - Hank Hill

In a world saturated with digital content, where images are shared and reshared to the point where their origins become murky, the concept of ownership and originality in digital media is more relevant than ever. This is the foundation of "The Infinite Mosaic," a game that challenges the very notions of creativity and intellectual property in the digital age.

At its core, the third fragment, The Infinite Mosaic, is a vast library, a compilation of every possible 3x3 pixel combination in a 4-bit color space, generated over 19 hours of intensive computational effort, the result of which is currently hosted in the cloud. This exhaustive collection is a testament to the finite nature of digital creation; there are only so many ways you can arrange a limited set of pixels in a limited space.

The interaction in the game is deceptively simple. Users upload an image, and the game randomly selects a 3x3 section from it. It then reveals that this exact combination of pixels already exists in its vast library, challenging the user's perception of their creation's uniqueness.

It is interesting to note the limitation of the library itself. If, for example, we were to instead use a 4x4 block, the time to generate these images, at a rate of 1 million images per second, is approximately 584,542 years. Similarly, if we were to generate 8-bit images at a 3x3 space, it would take 149.6 million years to create all 256⁹ images required. If we took this to the extreme, and generated 600x400 images in 24-bit color depth (RGBA), the total images would be 256^600x400x3, or 10^1,733,938 bytes, which would require over 100,000 times the total amount of energy in the known universe to calculate.

In the era of remix culture and widespread digital tools, The Infinite Mosaic questions the very concept of originality. If every possible combination of a small pixel area has been pre-generated, what does that say about our creations? Are they truly ours, or just undiscovered pieces of a vast digital puzzle?

This idea was also explored by CodeNoodles in this video which came out, by complete coincidence, just a week before this Fragment released, which itself was based on the work of the Library of Babel, which theoretically contains every possible image.

However, The Infinite Mosaic actually performs, practically, albeit on a small scale. By showing that any given 3x3 segment of an image is not unique, it challenges the legal and ethical frameworks that govern digital media. Where does one draw the line between inspiration and infringement, especially in a medium inherently built on reuse and recombination?

Despite the digital world often feeling boundless, The Infinite Mosaic also highlights its limitations. The finite nature of this pixel library serves as a metaphor for the boundaries of digital creation itself. It's a reminder that our digital universe, much like our physical one, has its limits.

Despite all this, there is also a message about creativity within this fragment: while the building blocks might be finite, the possibilities for human creativity are not. As you interact with this seemingly infinite library, you are invited to ponder: In a world where everything has already been made, what does it mean to create?