“Cyberspace is a socially – mediated construction, made clear through the use of avatars, or personal representations in virtual worlds. By putting ourselves into digital worlds, we lose the self and become one with virtual spaces’ new elements. It seems that an aspect of identity is released as an electronic element … By putting ourselves into digitally constructed realities, we call into question the nature of the self in a digital culture and the ways the new selves are created. What are the elements which construct that reality? What is our relationship with the virtual personae and figures we create in online space? What is our relationship to our own data, our bodies sampled with the latest digital technology?
But what is, in fact, natural? Digital culture’s dominance, and ultimately, construction of landscapes and bodies has been a way to create new cosmologies, new elements. The creation and discovery of elements is a fundamentally human endeavor, as are the creations of new systems of representation, identities, and experiences in VR. We work to abstract and distort reality in order to apprehend it. Like language, we name, categorize, and quantify our surroundings.
[unnatural elements] presents images of researcher|artists from Taiwan and the USA which demonstrate that the conversion from the image of the physical body to the image of the virtual is not the typical smooth computational process as Hollywood would have us believe.
The images featured in [unnatural elements] show the effects of the creation of a digital nature and digital elements. Most researchers working in 3D technologies strive for “perfection.” However, our team was interested in sampling one real and watching the translation between earthbound identites and virtual ones. What would human data create in cyberspace? The images were created by using 3D head scans of the artists from composited images produced by a video camera and stitching them together in custom software. Interestingly, the process generated “natural” eruptions inherent to the heads, and each scan seemed to take on forms reminiscent of “natural” eruptions we see in earth, fire, water, and wind.
Here, our new bodies erupt with artifacts and take on unexpected resemblances to earthbound natural elements. The”random” patterns we see in rocks, water, and other natural elements are not random at all but naturally occurring algorithms. Thus the computer, in creating artifacts, is effectively doing nature’s work. In a sense the computer is much more “real” (disturbingly so) than WE are – when it creates artifacts it is acting on “natural” algorithms.
Offering us a way to critically examine the body in cyberspace and our conventions and ideals of interactive avatars and the drive for 3D art “realism,” these pieces work to provoke a dialogue about the real and “natural” our media is trying so desperately to produce in digital space.” – Mary Flanagan
“With future forecasts declaring ultimate doom from all components of the man-altered world, it seems there is a clog in the conduit of information transmitted between those in control and the public at large. Black Ops, psychological torture, acoustic weapons, Project Starfire, and a multitude of other state sponsored programs exist, well-hidden in plain sight, shrouded in a stigma of conspiracy and diluting any significant public inquiry.
Psych Securities LLC is an ongoing exploration of this aforementioned covert reality, most clearly seen while in an alternative psychological state. By compiling declassified documents, historical narratives, and psychedelic conjecture, a visual world is pieced together; undermining strategies of deception and concealed truths.
The images, as photographic composites, mimic this process. The traditions of large format picture taking are practiced (by way of staging, model building, and location photography) and combined with digital synthesis, to render an optically clear, hyperactive final image. The project’s modular presentation allows clustered photographs to resemble the structure of the intelligence networks that have inspired a number of the depictions themselves.” – Gerald Edwards III
“How do we account for the affect of materiality in a particular work? One way to think about it is as a process. This is not an original point. In “The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event”, Katherine Hayles develops a more sophisticated description of materiality than Writing Machines. Analyzing the distributed structure of the material in digital poetry, she concludes that rather than a discreet object, the poem can be seen as an event, “brought into existence when the program runs on the appropriate software loaded onto the right hardware” (182). If a digital work only exits through multiple layers of material, it cannot be “performed” if any level is interrupted (185). Therefore, the digital work is an “event” or “performance” because it requires the operation of multiple points of materiality. Under this scheme, materiality becomes a “dance between the medium’s physical characteristics and the work’s signifying strategies”; it is “contingent, provisional, and debatable” and therefore considered more of an “event” than a pre-existing discreet object (206). Paradoxically however, the risk of treating the digital poem and its material as an autonomous “event” is a perception of immateriality. Johanna Drucker, cited by Brian Lennon, suggests a similar approach. She identifies the conflict between immanence and nontranscendence in applications of materiality (72). The concept cannot be based in an immaterial Derridian deconstruction, after Derrida however, nor can it return to a self-evident presence (71). This conflict “disappears” if materiality is understood as a “process”, where the material of an artefact only exists in the activity of interpretation (72). As a “process”, the material can never be located before the text, however, the text cannot exist without the material. Heidegger discusses a similar dilemma: “the artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artists. Neither is without the other” (Heidegger, 143). The text therefore can only exist between the two.” – Tim Steer (dissertation extract)
“Hank Schmidt in der Beek (born 1978, lives in Berlin) draws on an archive of art history, documentary films, exhibition visits and lectures to create new levels of meaning. His automated painting technique is a process-driven method that brings paintings seen in documentaries about Mondrian, Magritte, Beckmann, Ernst and Hockney back to the canvas. In doing so, he appropriates another painter’s technique, using it as a narrative strategy to create something that is entirely his own. Schmidt in der Beek creates his collages by selecting and combining items from his vast library of visual elements. With a diverse array of visual levels, the artist succeeds in creating new meanings, which in turn generate a formalistic, graphic and unmistakably humorous aesthetic. In his series “Man Ray im Internationalen Kontext” (Man Ray in an International Context) he brings together visual materials featuring artistic and film icons of the 1920s and 1930s that are ingrained in the public consciousness. In one of the works, for example, Laurel and Hardy examine classic works of modern art while avoiding existing theoretical discourses, almost as if they are trying to offer the viewer a new perspective on them. And all without using words, of course.” – Kunstverein
“Redefining the existent media and technologies from unique angles, he has been active in various fields, such as art, design, and even research and development. He produces sounds, images, and light by analyzing and transforming numerical values gained from various sensors and input devices.
He is internationally active as a Turntablist and a Sound Artist using surround/oscillation/super low frequency technology and pursuing sensual peculiarity, commonality and interaction.” – Daito Manabe
“„self.detach“ is a monolithic object, not serving the purpose of analyzing the data by quantity, but following a critical design approach. The Flickr live photo stream is constantly downloaded, all currently posted images moving through the beholders’ field of vision on a small display. Those images tagged with terms like „me“, „myself“, „i“, „moi“, ich“ and so on are displayed larger than the others and dissolved into a stream of red, green and blue particles, which is continued outside of the screen as physically tangible grains of coloured sand. The identities staged on Flickr.com are, like a finished Mandala, dissolved. The decomposition into the basic colors symbolizes the irrelevance of the digital self.” – Tim Horntrich and Jens Wunderling.
“In subject matter Michaela Thelenová’s work derives almost exclusively from the ambiguous reality of the post-industrial environment of North Bohemia. The poignant intimacy of her approach is further intensified by a frequently inspiring focus on her closest vicinity, when she uses as models for her artwork sections of her househould, neighbours or family members. With such close detail, Thelenová is obsessively focusing on parts of the depressing post-communist urban landscape, overlapping the deformed social structure with the illusion of consumerist opulence, recording the remains of the German past of the region, comparing the image of nature with the human desire to change its form and recreate it, confronting the global aspect of computer networks with the fragmentariness of their concrete participants, stealthily scanning the sides of main roads where prostitutes loiter next to memorials to victims of traffic accidents. However, the author does not sift through this diverse but geographically located material with an aim to compose a clearly defined photographic documentary, or to compile a socially conscious visual message. Her artistic strategy is based on a thorough sharing of events and on creating a critical discourse, through accummulation of visual elements. The result of this approach is an emotional series of photographs consisting of individual images that are frequently not linked by any causal relationship and resist traditional logic. These pictures simply exist next to each other, and demonstrate their random congruity, they tempt the viewer to break into them so that they might become a part of him or herself.” – excerpt from catalog text by Michal Koleček, 2004 at Hunt Kastner
“”Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is the title of an ongoing series of photographs. It started with five images that were material drawn from publicity stills of Marilyn Monroe, with the central figure removed. And at this point it’s kind of morphed into something else. Now I’m raiding the archives of the NBA and finding photographs that I’m manipulating to, generally speaking, remove a lot of contextual detail to leave a kind of solitary figure in the setting of a crowd of people.
The series started with research that I was doing into, at the time, images of Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn? At that point I thought this has got to be one of the most famous human bodies in the archive. It conjures up so much, it’s such a legend. And so I went through these images and ended up selecting a few of them and then going in and erasing Marilyn Monroe from the image. One of the things that really interested me was that in the process, really what was going on was not so much erasure and it never really is. It’s actually more like camouflage in the sense that you are taking pieces of the background from around the image and very slowly applying these pieces over the body so that in the end you’re presenting the illusion that you are seeing through to the background. But in fact you are inventing background material that wasn’t there before.
What I found out or what I ended up with, which I didn’t really expect, was in some ways the most abstract images that I’ve made so far. Unless you know that Marilyn was there you wouldn’t otherwise know that there was a figure there, much less that it was specifically Marilyn. At the time I was really quite focused on the process itself and the historical resonance and the emotional resonance that I felt working on these images. I’ve been asked after the fact how I would describe that, and I’ve thought that it’s a bit like what people describe as far as ghost limbs among soldiers. In a war people lose a limb and will have this continuing feeling like they still have that limb. Like a ghost limb. Another kind of dramatic example is when the World Trade Center went down. For long afterwards you sort of looked up and expected to see something there. Although it’s literally taking the figure away, in some ways it’s also intensifying something about the figure that used to be there.
Now this year and late last year I’ve been continuing this series under the same title, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” but talking a very different approach. Now I’m starting from images that I’m drawing from the online archive of the NBA. These are images that you can pull up on your screen and then order for something like twenty or thirty bucks a pop, and some of them are quite amazing. They go back to the 1950s and are some of the most striking images of sports legends in the environment of the stadium or the arena with the crowds in the background. And so I’ve been selectively appropriating these images and manipulating them to remove all the contextual detail, so that what remains is not an absent figure but an intensified figure by virtue of the fact that you are lacking some aspects of a context to place it in.
In the last of these images that I completed, for example, I started from an image taken from a game in which Wilt Chamberlain is putting the ball in the basket and there’s three or four figures around him all trying to prevent him from doing that. And the figure that remains is not Wilt Chamberlain. It’s actually one of the minor figures from the margins of the image. All the others were removed and this sideline image was moved to the center. So for me it’s quite striking because, by virtue of being in the margins, I suppose the person who composed the shot wasn’t too concerned with what the figure on the side was doing. He’s reaching up to stop the ball and is in this position that’s so foreshortened that his shoulders almost completely cover his head. His head is thrown far back and his legs are extended out in a kind of extreme way.
Moving this figure to the center makes sense if you see him on the margins. It’s an odd contradiction that you’re left with because now it seems the shot was composed completely around him. And it’s breaking every rule of composition. It looks like his head is chopped off, all of his limbs look awkward. To me it almost resembles the figure in a photograph of a lynching. At any rate, there’s a strange kind of inconsistency to the composition of the image. At the same time this awkwardly composed person is standing dead center in an arena surrounded by thousand of people who are watching—and there is no ball, no basket, no reason for him to be jumping or floating in this way. It is the sense of not just a lack of context, but in a way it looks like this figure has somehow been frozen into this frame. It looks quite airless and almost like a stain on the image.” – Paul Pfeiffer via Art 21
“In this work I present a pair of found postcards that looks “totally the same” at first sight, but actually they differ in many details in the picture (a time shift of several minutes is apparent) and also on the back sides. On each postcard it is stated a different photographer; the post offices and the times when the postcards were sent are also varying.. However, the addressee is always the same person.
The pairs of postcards are open to diverse explanations of their origins and possible alternatives of their delivery.” – Kateřina Držková
“Using dozens of systematically collected postcards I reconstructed how one of the most popular destinations of Czechs in the 1970ies, the seaside resort Albena in Bulgaria, was looking like.
Based on that data I created a three-dimensional model of Albena. Thanks to the recurring architectonic elements I was able to imagine some places that were not visible on the postcards because they were not attractive enough to be shown. In my model the hidden places were marked black in contrary to the white parts showing the “most beautiful” sites.” – Kateřina Držková
“If it isn’t easy to find a standout work in Elad Lassry’s current show, it isn’t just because all the works, including multiple photographs (all with minimal but custom, often color- coordinated frames) and a projected film, are presented within the same modest size range. It’s because it’s hard to pick from a group of works that are each oddly, uniquely and smartly compelling. In one, a publicity or glamour shot shows what appears to be an old-school bombshell with big hair and a sparkling tone-on-tone blue gown. Actually, there’s a fair amount of guesswork here, as a strip of purple metallic foil applied vertically down the center of the photo plays havoc with your ability to make sense of the photo. One wonders initially, for instance, if it doesn’t actually picture two women huddled closely together, and the strip of foil, covering up most of each, leaves the viewer to assume a single, mostly covered body not unlike in a magic trick. And one is left wondering as well of the identity and stature of the figure pictured; are the person and the dress a match or an odd fit, and, given the glitz of the getup, is this a showgirl or stripper, drag queen or royal, music or movie star? Scraped away flakes of the foil suggest there’s enough skin exposed in the underlying photo to rule out the likelihood that it depicts a tarted-up head of state, but you don’t get much further, and find yourself letting go of the semiotic decoding (which we’ve all become rather well trained at) and reveling instead in how a simple manipulation of a low image has yielded a mesmerizing bit of the uncanny. Such experiences come up again and again, as Lassry presents images as varied as a portrait of a skunk (another humorous insertion of a stripe into a photo), a gleefully bare young lad with an over-the-top floral pattern either backdropped or digitally dropped in behind him, a shot of a miniature purse and shoe perched on pedestals as if merchandised in a department store, a series of images of boys playing driveway basketball, and a film, inspired by photographic documentation and production stills from the rehearsal of Jerome Robbins’ 1955 made-for-TV production of Peter Pan. With Eric Stoltz cast as Robbins and Merett Miller as Mary Martin, Lassry offers not a re- creation of the prior production, but a combined aesthetic, dramatic and psychological study of the production as the product of a specific cultural moment. But it’s stranger than that, with an odd separation between specificity and the emotive in upper-body shots, and other shots in which legs divide space into sexually charged quasi-abstractions of line and color. Looking around the show at how Lassry variously plays the uncanny against matters of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, fantasy and politics, one is tempted to make a mental checklist of the “pictures” artists (as well as proto- and post-pictures artists) to whom he is indebted — a Baldessari move here, a Sherman maneuver there, a half-Simmons, a full- Lockhart. But what might be a knock of derivation in other cases stands here as a credit to an artist who has made a practice out of the art of being a student of photography, and who, though only recently out of school, will likely remain a student for the balance of a promising career.” – Miles Christopher for LA Weekly
