2011

Image is Dialectics at a Standstill

Forty years seperate the events captured in these images, one from May 1968 Paris and the other from November 2011 New York. The pixels from each have been rearranged to approximate the image of the other.

From A to B

To say that under a regime of the digital, the photograph has become "dubious," as Peter Lunenfeld has, still does not account fully for the ontological change that photography has undergone. The gross manipulability of the photograph is actually that which is most clearly understood and commonly  remarked on.

Degradation Study

In this experiment I fed back images into the system which created them so that the subsequent image degraded in each instantiation.

This fade to black approximates the effects of massified circulation of images where it seems that over time the images which once shocked, after repeated exposure, seem hardly able to elicit any response at all.

The Reality Is Not Conveyed

In Precarious Life, Judith Butler writes, "The reality is not conveyed by what is represented within the image, but through the challenge to representation that reality delivers." As I set up my drawing machine to reproduce the images from Abu Ghraib, I had that problem in mind.

Black and White Atrocity

I continue to question the ethics of representing atrocity and the ironic dissipation of the moral force of images of atrocity within the society of the spectacle.

Lines: Frequency Study

This is simple algorithm for the plotter where it draws a series of parrallel lines with variable frequency to fill the page.

In \a\ Place of Small Crows

I was compelled to return to images from Abu Ghraib so long after the revelations of 2004 as much for what had happened as because of what had not happened in since.

This work is a book in two volumes containing the processed photos of the corpus originally released in 2004.

Every Pixel Screaming

This video is derived from the archive of torture videos that came out of Abu Ghraib. By writing software that sonifies the otherwise silent frames of video, the work attempts to question the silence which has left the victims of these atrocities without justice or redress.

The visual aspect derives from the rearangement of the pixels by a color ordering algorithm.

Plotter Drawings

Working in software has made me particularly interested in the fetishization of the artist's hand. That is why a drawing machine is a particularly attractive output device. It mediates the gesture of the hand drawn and the machinic world of software which is most often present to us now as the bloodless surface of a screen.