Soon, she was inundated with direct messages and emails from people sending her photos of LAN parties they attended 20 years ago. The images depict more than just the communal experience of teens playing video games together. They capture the artifacts that defined the technological revolution that was sweeping the world in the first decade of this century: long cords snake across floors, desks, and counters; pirated copies of games recorded on marker-labeled discs are scattered under cardboard plates filled with half-eaten slices of cake; and oversized ear cups sit next to gaming mice.
Most of the photos are from the US, where the space provided by large suburban homes for a dozen or more computers made LAN parties popular weekend activities. But Merritt was also able to obtain images of parts of Europe, Africa and South America.
Tracing the rights to each photo was difficult, according to Merritt. But there was an added challenge: Most of the images in the book of him were taken with digital cameras from 20 years ago, devices that had considerably lower resolution than today’s smartphone cameras. This meant that printing them in a book would be nearly impossible.
To get around this, the Read-Only Memory editor is using Gigapixel AI, an image-processing software from Texas-based Topaz Labs that enhances low-resolution images using machine learning and neural networks.
But why not make a website instead of a book? “There is a poetic resonance between the physicality of a LAN party and the physicality of a book,” Merritt said. “It just makes a lot of sense to me.”
