Is Random Art Still Art?

Back in Olympia after three weeks in LA. Sorting through thousands of images.

The ones below I took - or rather, my Contour Roam Helmet Cam took these photos - on a ride from my hotel in downtown LA to Chinatown two Sundays ago. As I wade through the photos I took on this trip - thousands, literally, both on the helmet camera and with my dSLR, I find myself asking if something that is basically the product of random luck can still be considered art. Looking through my dSLR photos, I find some I like and others I don't, posting a few of the former and deleting most of the latter. But all of the handheld photos share the same quality of being shots I consciously took, looked through a viewfinder to take (even if only for a second). The shots below are the best ones from a 20 minute ride @ one shot every three seconds. So @ 20 shots a minute, that's 400 shots, of which these 25 are the ones I find interesting enough to show.




Assuming that they are interesting, or pretty, or otherwise worth taking a few seconds to look at, it raises the question should I take pride in this work?  


I didn't buy the Helmet Cam so much to take video - I did do some of that,  there are a couple of those videos in the post below - as for the still photo capability. My idea was to shoot 1 still per second and stitch them together to create a flip-book effect. My first experience with this wasn't all that satisfying. Shots taken in low light were blurry, and though some were trippy I wasn't sure how interesting any of them were. I made this short film from a series I'd shot, so opine away.

Some of the shots taken during the day were fantastic, at least to the eyes of my friend Anna who studied photography and speaks of images using terms like "vanishing point" and "strong vertical lines."  But again, I find myself asking myself can I take any real credit for taking them? 


I mean, at no point did I stop and frame any of them, or if I did it was mostly an accident at having stopped and looked at something long enough for the helmet cam to do its job. Then again, I'm the guy who strapped a camera onto my helmet and rode through traffic. I'm also the guy wading through close to 2500 shots and deleting the blurry, crappy and merely meh.  So I guess that counts for something, eh?

What I really want are Spider Jerusalem's Glasses, which shoot images in random bursts and upload them directly into Spider's skull. Spider Jerusalem is a real journalist. Spider Jerusalem is a made-up character. If not for this last fact, you would fear him.

(Spider Jerusalem's image and existence courtesy of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson.)


By the end of the Getty Fellowship I'd pretty much decided not to keep the Contour Roam helmet Cam. I wasn't a fan of the fish-eye video effect, and found that the natural movement of my head while riding made watching videos shot from a helmet mounted cam uncomfortable for more than a minute at a time.

(Sound Quality also left much to be desired no matter how I set the thing.)

And while some of the images I shot using the still functions came out good, I didn't feel like I was going to use that feature all that much, and will probably opt for a handheld digital video recorder at some point in the near future.

But looking through the still photos, I keep finding ones that I think are good, bordering on excellent even. This is causing me a certain sense of...what would the opposite of Buyer's remorse be? Returner's remorse?  Perhaps I'll buy me another Contour Roam when my fantastic screenplay wealth comes in...

Stay tuned. Opine on pics. Yes. Comments. More to come. Many, many new tales to tell.

~ S. Tofu