Inspired by the Jim Campbell show, I thought it would be interesting to do an informal experiment with an image to see where its liminal threshold really is—to find out how much information we actually need to figure out what’s going on in a photo.

(See the previous post, Quantizing? Liminal? I need a dictionary… for a brief intro to these terms and the Jim Campbell exhibition—with video examples.)

So I took a high resolution photograph and created a series of images by drastically reducing the visual information in each—quantizing the original or limiting the set of data for each image. The first image has the least visual information, and each successive image has 4 times more visual information.

So the question is: At what point do you understand what the subject of the photo is?

Reveal each image below one by one and note which image you are looking at when you figure out what the subject is. And then please leave a comment at the bottom of the page telling everyone where the liminal threshold was for you. And be honest : )

Reveal/Hide Image 1

Reveal/Hide Image 2

Reveal/Hide Image 3

Reveal/Hide Image 4

Reveal/Hide Image 5

Reveal/Hide Image 6

Reveal/Hide Original

OK, so it’s not really the “original,” because that image would likely be bigger than your screen and take a while to download. But this is the image from which I derived all the others.

If you’re curious, I took this photo during Red Hot 2005, our annual gala event, while dancers from Tango Fusion were on the floor of our Hot Shop. In the bottom right corner of the image is a glass sculpture that was completed minutes earlier by Nancy Callan and Robbie Miller. It’s set in a sand mound and still glowing hot.

Note that since you can hide or reveal each image, you can easily compare a couple. For instance, hide all but the third and the original to examine how image information was restricted (or quantized).

So where was the threshold between perceptible and imperceptible for you? Leave your thoughts and let us know.