The Family Mosaic
In August 1977 my wife and I were headed home after a stimulating year in Taiwan, where she had taught college students philosophy on a Henry Luce Fellowship, while I had practiced landscape architecture in the Taiwan Tourism Bureau. That year changed everything, turning the abstraction of Asia as we once understood it into something relatable. Where East met West was hard to say, for they were as overlapped as a Venn diagram, as interconnected as yin and yang.
We knew we were back in the West when we reached Italy, where we immersed ourselves in Rome, Florence, Venice, and smaller cities in between. In Ravenna, a UNESCO World Heritage site renowned for its early Christian mosaics, we came across San Vitale, a magnificent octagonal basilica consecrated in 547 AD. Inside, the mosaic figures of the Emperor Justinian, the Empress Theodora, and their retinue had been dazzling visitors with their vivid color for 1430 years. In a nearby mosaic shop, we fell head over heels in love with a replica of a San Vitale mosaic of Giovannina, an attendant of Theodora, garbed in a robe of green, orange, and gold, against a shimmering green and gold background. Its square tiles (technically “tessera”), each smaller than a postage stamp, each of a solid color, matched precisely those of the original. We were smitten, but it was pricey. The young man behind the sales counter figured us for two Americans and announced, “Elvis e morto.” We looked confused, so he started to gyrate and croon some Elvis until we got it. This really was the end of an era. Elvis was now mystically connected to Giovannina. We had to leave for home without her, just a postcard of her, with the price (420,000 lire) and address (Scuola de Mosaicisti, via Chartres) penned on the back.
Two years passed, and we had not forgotten the mosaic. For our upcoming fifth wedding anniversary, we decided to contact the shop to see if by any chance they still had the mosaic. With the help of an Italian-born student, I typed up an airmail letter, and not knowing how else to address the envelope (I had misplaced the postcard with the address), simply drew a map with the approximate location marked by an arrow. It got there. And they still had the Giovannina. As once Elvis crooned, some things are meant to be. The expertly crated and beautifully crafted mosaic arrived two months later. Paintings can fade, but mosaic tile colors are eternal. In the ensuing four decades, Giovannina became a member of our family, eyeing us in the dining room and later in the front hall. Indeed, according to the numbers, the sixth-century Giovannina is at least a distant cousin, if not aunt or grandmother, to everyone with European forebears.
As we entered the digital age, I began to think of mosaic tiles as forerunners of pixels. They each have their own identity, and yet they are part of something much bigger than themselves. The image that they collectively form is an interconnected community. Coincidentally, my mantra in life had become E. M. Forster’s exhortation, Only connect.
Two decades after our year in Asia, in 1996, Life Magazine’s 60th anniversary cover boasted an image of Marilyn Monroe composed of a grid of Life Magazine covers, created by the MIT Media Lab student Rob Silvers, who had just trademarked the term photomosaic. Suddenly, photomosaics were going viral, spreading the idea of communities made of human tesserae. They particularly lent themselves to patriotic themes, such as Lady Liberty, powerfully embodying the notion of commonwealth, and one that is not so much a melting pot as a multicultural community.
A decade later came the emergence of LED light panels composed of a dense grid of diodes. Each diode was like a mosaic tile, but each could change colors, and together the light panels could form images like logos. I envisioned LED wall displays with a higher calling—not to sell products, but to move people with engaging images. Three decades after our year in Taiwan 2006, I was back, pitching just that in what I called Yin Bing Men (Welcome Guests Gate), a public plaza design, to my old colleagues at the Tourism Bureau. The public plaza featured an LED photomosaic covering a wall, like an interactive mural, made up of the friendly faces of visitors and Taiwanese people.
Coincidentally, our son Mallory, a software engineer at Apple, had come up with a photomosaic screensaver. It turned one’s entire photo library into tiles, collectively forming an image from the photo library. But it was not a one-off image. Heavens no. After five seconds it slowly receded into the distance to become a tile in yet another image from the photo library that took its place filling the screen for five seconds, before it too slowly receded, and so on. The community of images was interconnected in a wholly new way, and each image had its place of honor, its moment of fame, being celebrated by all the others. Each image morphed into the next by becoming immersed in it. When my son showed it to me, I was smitten again. My MacBook proudly used the photomosaic screensaver until it too receded into the distance, superseded by the usual still images.
When our three children married over three years, and six grandchildren appeared over five years, Lynn and I came to realize that we had somehow launched a family diaspora spread across the land. With Covid sequestration, we connected across the generations and across space on Facetime. I had time to create an online version of our family tree that until now had only existed in my handwriting on family tree fan-charts I had started as a teenager. The digital world of a tree constructed on ancestry.com, with its branches extending back generations and built using a community’s sharing of their own trees, spoke to a sense of interconnectedness, an ecosystem.
It was just a matter of time before I came to realize that a photomosaic built of tiles of family images could express the wonder of this same interconnectedness. The juxtaposition of images, whose positions are determined solely by their role in the overarching color scheme, but are otherwise random, unleashes other unexpected connections, as if neighboring tiles are engaged in a lively cross-generational conversation.
Images of one’s whole life gathered in a photomosaic is like a perennial garden, landscape, a map, each tile of which is composed of digital bytes, each of them in turn composed of electric impulses interacting with silicone, in a vast cosmos of subatomic particles defying time and space. Mosaics are indeed a metaphor for one’s place-moment in the space-time continuum, not to mention the perfect metaphor for one’s family, and the human family. And for me it all started with Giovannina.
© 2023 Thomas M. Paine
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