Search for “ape” on Flickr and you’ll witness an endlessly scrolling cavalcade of primate photography, from monkeys glimpsed on safari to those held in captivity at the zoo. Until recently, you’d also see a portrait of a middle-aged black man named William. Flickr thought William was an ape, too.

In an essay for The Awl called "The Triumphant Rise of the Shitpic," Brian Feldman gave name to a defining aesthetic of the social internet: Shitpics are image files that have been put through a wringer of so many screencaps, shares, reuploads, and Instagram filters that the ugly digital artifacts introduced by those processes are as central to their identities as the images themselves. With his project I Am Sitting In Stagram, artist Pete Ashton takes the rise of the shitpic to its apocalyptic conclusion.

We're living in a golden age for photography. You go to New York; you take a picture. You go to London; you take a picture. You go to Los Angeles; you take a picture. You go home and upload those pictures to the internet, where they live forever with thousands of other equally miserable and nearly identical pictures of the same landmarks and tourist attractions. Corinne Vionnet takes those boring pictures and mashes them all together into something worth looking at.

The photo above was taken by Sarah Scurr on November 6, 2006, while Scurr was aboard a cruise ship near Chile's Northern Patagonian Ice Field. The photo below was taken by Marisol Ortiz Elfeldt on the same day, from the same ship, and looks nearly identical to Scurr's—a fact that recently led to a bizarre public row over accusations of plagiarism.