Approximate West is a chronological data visualization of the change in the usage of colour in the western-genere movie title cards throughout the past century. The dataset itself consists of more than 200 title cards ranging from The Covered Wagon (1923) to The Settlers (2023), with films being selected based on their popularity on Letterboxd as an approximate metric for a films significance, ranging from Django Unchained (2012) with 4.4M logged views to Return of the Texan (1952) with 221 logged views.

The colours are visualized through colour bars representing the colour clusters present in each title card, illustrating the range of colours from most frequent to least frequent. These representations are – inherently – only an approximation, as an accurate reproduction of the ‘true’ colours being impossible, with every step of the film’s production and distribution, and my algorithmic interpretation of the title cards afterwards altering or degrading the colour in every step. This is in my eyes less as a flaw of the process, but more in line with today’s media culture and our relationship to film as a medium, with much of our consumed media being streamed or pirated copies, which themselves suffer from heavy compression algorithms, altering or clustering colours, too. This foundational concept is abstracted from Hito Steyerl’s ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’ in which she talks about the transformation of ‘authentic images’ through time and media resulting in ‘poor images’.

ECAL MA Type Design semester project
Mentored by Radim Peško

Photographs: Julieta Tarraubella

Approximate West dataset Letterboxd list: https://boxd.it/TgLkg