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The image lets you zoom in to a remarkable degree, offering a chance to become a quasi-omniscient onlooker of a single frozen moment of time, from a single fixed point. Inside your photographic domain you'll find innumerable scenes of everyday life–trees being trees, people being people, and lots of buildings being buildings–but if you spend enough time looking, you'll find something else, too: a good deal of beauty.

>I spent three hours immersed in this frozen metropolis.

New types of art–or even just new types of media–demand new ways of looking. These gigantic, interactive panoramas offer several. Play with it for a minute or two and you'll probably be stuck on the sheer technical wow-factor. It can't possibly zoom in any further, you'll think. Then: My God it does! Look a little bit longer and you might end up following the same arc as Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, starting as an idle voyeur and ending up as a sort of stationary detective, investigating rooftops, alleys, and people themselves for hidden intrigue.

But in an image this large, where so much physical space is captured in such high resolution, there's also, inevitably, art. Or at least fragments that are artful. It's a little bit like a photographic version of the infinite monkeys theorem. Photograph so much life, and some of it's bound to be evocative, in one way or another. So, on a recent afternoon, I spent three hours immersed in this frozen metropolis, searching not for sordid happenings but for those scattered bits of beauty.

Sometimes that meant stumbling across people doing interesting or poetic things; more often it meant zeroing in on interesting arrangements of color, form, or line. Architecture ended up being a reliable subject, but my interest in it varied. In some cases, patterns caught my eye; in others, I just liked the light or the color or the texture–none of which, it should be pointed out, are things that Martin possibly could have considered on the same scale I was (he made the panorama from 8,000 shots, captured over the course of three hours or so with a Canon 7D controlled by a robotic device.)

On a basic level, mine was an exercise in curation. I clicked and dragged this truly massive image across my laptop screen until something interesting wound up inside of its borders. I took screenshots of things that I would have taken photographs of had I been there in person–compositions that piqued my aesthetic interest, for one reason or another. Coming out of my three-hour Tokyo excursion was strange and disorienting–some unique virtual variety of jet lag. But the folder of screenshots I ended up with was even stranger. Did I take these photographs? Did Jeffrey Martin? Are they photographs at all? Are any of them worth a damn?

>Did I take these photographs? Did Jeffrey Martin? Are they photographs at all?

These can be interesting things to think about. The artist Jon Rafman, whose blog, 9-Eyes, is filled entirely with strange, sublime imagery found on Google Street View, has shown that curation can be an artistic act in and of itself; some of Rafman's screenshots have been exhibited, unaltered, on gallery walls. The types of massive panoramas made by Martin and others are their own unique beast, but in a world that's being documented more and more thoroughly with each passing day–by security cameras, wearable devices like Google Glass, and, yes, fantastically comprehensive gigapixel panoramas–we'll only be left with vaster heaps of visual data to sort through. Some estimates put the number of pictures being generated every day above a billion. And as that number grows, finding signal amidst all that noise will inevitably become a more viable artistic pursuit.

Here's another way to think about it. Photography once meant capturing a single place at a single point in time, in person. But like going to work, talking to friends, playing poker and so many other formerly in-the-flesh activities, perhaps we're reaching a point where the "in person" part of that photographic act is increasingly irrelevant.