This cloud study by David Hume, a South Australian visual artist, is an example of a networked digital image, which was referred to in the first Light Paths’ newsletter. David says that this image is a painting of a photograph of a cloud, which is then itself further manipulated digitally and transmitted over the Internet, initially via Instagram, then the Light Paths‘ blog.

Cloud study illustrates how the humble photographic image in a rapidly changing photographic world now consists of a number of hybridized digital forms and how , despite its mutation though its circulation in the network, the digital image retains its internal consistency.

Behind the digital image is an infinitesimal complexity of the underpinning algorithms which account for the fractal-like ability of the digital image to be repeated, mutated through repetition and spread through various points of the network (in this case Instagram and Light Paths).