In 1969, American composer and artist Alvin Lucier created I Am Sitting In A Room, an audio experiment demonstrating the iterative degradation of repeated audio recording and playback. By re-recording the same audio within the same room, the resonant frequencies of the room are revealed, as detail and form become distorted beyond the point of recognition.

“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”

-Alvin Lucier, 1969

The photography we create, share, copy and share again on the World Wide Web exhibits this same behaviour - the compression artefacts have become prominent in online content. We play a worldwide game of “Chinese Whispers” with photography today - with every share, a little bit of data and information is lost.

As a homage to Lucier, and in reference to digital image compression, I too recorded myself photographically “sitting in a room”. I compressed the image ten thousand times at different compression rates, in an attempt to create this iterative entropy in compression. The hexadecimal code of various photos during the process is presented in its entirety, showing the compression of bytes with every iteration. This is accompanied by a video showing the effects of JPEG compression.