Alex M. Lee
Monday, 11 August 2014
Work from his oeuvre
“My work is an investigation on the possibilities of digital imagery in an increasingly technical and automated world. Originally born out of pictures theory, my practice focuses on the nature of artifice and immateriality within the digital & virtual image. I consider the virtual in relationship to the phrase “technical image” coined by philosopher Vilem Flusser in which photography and mechanical reproduction heralded new forms of perceptual experience and knowledge. We are living in an age of the ‘elite technical image’ where increasingly complex technical apparatuses are being utilized for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. The material products of these technical apparatuses often find their way into my work, whether they be from sources from Science or from Modernism.
There is an additional phenomenological layer to my time-based works. The work utilizes the loop, slow pacing, and the relatively still to great effect. The temporal disjunction from the natural and the endless repetition allude to an abstraction of time and perception. I view these works as ‘moving pictures’ rather than animations per se. The works connection to light is derived with algorithms within the computer. Thus, the images indexical connection to light is purely artificial. My work is thereby ‘generatively indexical’, utilizing the tools and devices found in physics simulation in order to arrive at a new formal possibility. Often times the work alludes to notions of the sublime or surreal within the context of the virtual – playing off hyperrealism, an aspect to the “simulacra” as coined by Jean Baudrillard.”