CODEC: on Thomas Ruff's JPEGs

For his JPEGs series started in 2002, German artist Thomas Ruff used digital photographs taken by himself and from the web, compressed using the maximum rate, and then decompressed into large-scale prints. This method of hypercompression and enlargement exposes the mathematical infrastructure of the JPEG image, i.e. the pixel blocks into which the image is split during the compression process. In so doing, Ruff turns a digital artefact (pixilation) into a default aesthetic, thereby exposing the JPEG as today's default mode of viewing images: online and on-screen. Based on a thorough study of JPEG compression and its artistic use by Ruff, we show that with this shift from geometric projection to algorithmic processing, 'photographic' no longer denotes a specific mode of image creation, but rather a specific mode of image processing and that the new 'architectural order' of the image is the mathematical matrix used during compression. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis.