When I saw Amazon’s A9 Local yellow pages feature, the first thing I thought of was Ed Ruscha’s 1966 artist book, Every Building on The Sunset Strip. It was the first Ruscha book I bought, and it makes me laugh to remember how I thought I paid too much for it way back when (it’s easily 10 times as expensive now).
Anyway, using Mikel Maron’s A9 whole-street-grabbing script, I tried all through that weekend to re-create Ruscha’s Sunset Strip. The result was a lot of technical annoyance.
First, starting from a given address, Maron’s script grabs an entire street–a damn big proposition in the case of Sunset Blvd. (Technically, The Strip itself is only a fragment, the section from Doheny to Crescent Heights, from Gil’s Liquors to the Virgin Megastore.)
Trying to save the giant series created some odd results: one seemingly random image would intersperse itself all the way along. After trying to edit this one out, the resulting series were suddenly non-continuous. Something odd was happening when I saved the series and then reconstituted it.
I hadn’t yet cropped the image series at the appropriate intersections, so I didn’t get to try knitting them together into two long panoramas. Actually, I found the A9 images’ redundancy kind of nice; the periodic picture-taking indirectly revealed the (non)movement of the traffic along the Strip.
Anyway, then I saw Jason pointing to Eric Etheridge’s discussion of Every Building, and I think, better to throw this out to the lazyweb and see if someone can tell me how to figure this out, or just do it and make their own selves net-famous.
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the making of, by greg allen