In 2002, German photographer Thomas Ruff began collecting low-resolution images from the internet and enlarging them to enormous proportions, with some prints reaching nearly three meters wide. The resulting series, titled “jpegs,” transformed compressed digital images into monumental works of art. The images depict everything from news events and disasters to nuclear tests and architecture, all sourced from the internet at their original resolution. Rather than correcting the compression, Ruff embraces it. Enlarged to exhibition scale, the images break apart into grids of colored squares, making the digital artifact itself the subject—a record not only of what happened, but of how the event was transmitted online.(Historic Vids)