The gallery that exhibited this work by the artist Penelope Umbrico called it an “installation.”

In our grammar, it’s an instantiation. The evidence is in its presence at an exhibition and the metadata that testifies to its specificity: “Sunset Portraits from 27,700,711 Sunset Pictures on Flickr on 05/04/15. 2015. 1,625 machine c-prints. Each 4in x 6in. Installation view at Sextant et plus, FOMO, Marseille, France.”³¹ We define this instantiation by its singularity.

But in a cleverly reflexive way, the work instantiates in order to reflect on the processes of instantiation. It’s clever-funny (just imagine, such ordinary pictures are art?) as well as clever-serious. 1,625 sunset photos are here instantiated in this instantiation of apparent sameness, but profoundly, no two are the same. The 1,625 must have been selected in an arbitrary kind of way from 27,700,711 instantiations Umbrico says were so labeled by Flickr on that day, because we know the artist could have not looked at all of them. The classification has been conceptual, and at this scale, the conceptualizing work has been done by the original photographers if they have tagged their pictures, or perhaps by the artificial intelligence of the image recognition software that has read their images.^§AS1.4.6c

For Sunset Portraits I found images where the technology of the camera is exposing for the sun, not the people in front of it, thereby erasing the subjectivity of the individual. I use the entire photograph for this work, thinking of the relationship between the collective and the individual, the individual assertion of ‘I am here’ in the process of taking the photograph, and the lack of individuality that is ultimately expressed, and experienced, when faced with so many assertions that are more or less all the same.³²

But every picture has been unambiguously instantiated. Every one will be unequivocally instantiated like this one, a picture of the artist taken at an exhibition in 2015: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thealdrich/16807094213/in/photolist-rBbKyr-6oucUz-4PmdeU-8mnSgq-Ddcu95-ar41bm-axKY1y-cqV1Cw-nFmUmP-nHoNCM-7NZSAn-cCbJvC-bq4EL8-dQzxqe-bbyZf8-e64emg-6oucVc-f7BKaH-7vFnLz-da9Wop-fgSrJ5-a3Hk5r-cqV6Au-8jR1Z3-f7yLYt-9XRpzo-fm15cn-fSQcgA-fm1esZ-7WkVuH-8zGQxu-f7PaaQ-8JeFPq-fgCrLR-fmfibQ-f7yW3c-f7yWmP-fm187F-fm1dba-fgCuVB-fmfd43-f7P2s1-fm14na-fgCs5D-6z2cwo-fm17gv-f7yW5t-fmfnCA-bgB1hk-fgCuHt

This is not a word because it can’t be spoken or even realistically written. We couldn’t type this and be sure we get it right. We had to “paste” it in – a nice metaphorical association with scrap-booking images. It’s a machine-readable grapheme. This is what proper nouns or noun phrases of yore used to do, but which they can’t do given the clarity of instantiation that we have found today we must have.

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³¹ http://penelopeumbrico.net/index.php/project/sunset-portraits/

³² Ibid.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 92-93. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Penelope Umbrico’s "Sunset Portraits" §MS1.1.1e