flotsam is the first image in a series of large scale composite panoramas pieced together from thousands of single images taken with public robotic webcams. It was made over the course of three years using a webcam installed on the rooftop of the Hilton Hotel at Ventura beach in California.

flotsam measures 3.27 x 2.18m (128" x 86") and allows for a high resolution close-up look of the beach littered with pebbles, concrete blocks, trash and kelp, and inhabited by squirrels, pigeons, seagulls and humans in the sidelines. Changes in season, weather, light and the tides get compressed into one composite landscape. A piece of driftwood appears several times in the image, having been moved by a beachwalker; a boulder has a double shadow -one captured in the morning, the other in the evening. While each single webcam capture is an actual representation of one moment in time and space, the sum of all the pictures creates a reality of its own.

The following webpages offer a taste of the panoramas's scale and its amount of detail, though ultimately the image has to be experienced in the real world.

view flotsam

view the next image in the series, the call