iPhone Cubism

Posted by Chris Wilson

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Anyone with an iPhone has probably been pleasantly surprised rather than frustrated, by a bug in the iPhone 2.0 software.

A glitch in the iPhone’s camera occasionally causes it to slice up the images. This random occurrence has become an art form, known as ‘iPhone Cubism’. This new form of random digital cubism already has its own website and a pool on flickr with over 500 submissions.

With the exception of analysis (replaced in this case by randomness), these photos continue the tradition of the original cubist movement. ‘Objects are broken up, analysed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form. Instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism’s distinct characteristics’

Below are a selection of some of my favourites from the flickr pool.
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In his seminal book, The Cubist Epoch, English art historian, Douglas Cooper describes the three phases of Cubism.

Phase 1 (1906-1908): Early Cubism, where the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque.
Phase 2 (1909-1914): High Cubism, the time when Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent.
Phase 3 (1914-1921): Late Cubism, the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.

I’m not sure iPhone Cubism qualifies as Phase 4, but its definitely worth celebrating. Especially as these serendipitous images may only be around until the next iPhone software update.

In the interests of preserving and showcasing some iPhone Cubsim, i’d like to invite anyone to email me, chris(at)designassembly.org their photos and i’ll post them in a gallery on here in the future, well, as soon as there’s enough to make an article out of, so keep them coming. There might even by a prize for the best image judged by the Design Assembly team.

Links
www.flickr.com/groups/iphonecubism/
www.iphonecubism.com/

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Posted: 08/12/2008

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  1. Posted by Tom Duncalf/10:33 am/08.12.2008

    Haha - that’s pretty cool! Making art out of software bugs - I like it.

  2. Posted by Sean/11:56 am/08.12.2008

    That is fantastic!

    How could somebody catch this ‘bug’? ;)

  3. Posted by iPhone glitch movement « mobile pictures/4:20 pm/08.12.2008

    [...] out on the web about the iPhone glitch that I recently blogged about. You can read about it here: http://www.designassembly.org/2008/12/08/iphone-cubism and see more iPhone glitch fun here: www.iphonecubism.com. Thanks to Dave Selman for bringing [...]

  4. Posted by Matt King/2:31 pm/09.12.2008

    Gutted! I’ve been deleting them. Didn’t think that it was creating art! I just thought it was messing up pictures of my cat.

  5. Posted by Gabe/3:20 am/10.12.2008

    I actually have a cubist picture from iPhone 2.0 taken during the DNC that I didn’t realize I had until now. It’s not as serious a glitch as these photos, as it simply appears to have moved the photo down and to the right and tiled the top and left, but it’s definitely the same glitch. So this software update clearly caused it to be more common, but the glitch has been around since at least 2.0.

  6. Posted by ben white/1:22 am/11.12.2008

    i find these absolutely wonderful!

  7. Posted by Kees/11:01 pm/14.12.2008

    Some of those got a surprising way of compositing the photo in a frame!

  8. Posted by tishon/11:14 pm/15.12.2008

    wow, I have never once wanted an iphone until now!

  9. Posted by Baskoro Widoatmodjo/3:32 pm/14.02.2009

    Do you know that there is an app that does just that? The name is Cubism and it’s available in the app store.