Images are forms of virtual, projected, embodied material woven with time.
Sublime Timescapes, 2016 – ongoing, film exposures looking at the sublime and time as landscape. Beauty lends itself to the dissolving of self. In seeing, the viewer and nature subjects merge through the experience of the pictorial field. Working with qualities unique to the medium of film photography, the references to the elements in the exposures perform as extracted allegorical devices. Five-element theory as esoteric myth meets aesthetic notions of Mental Turbulence in looking at Vision and Image to understand aesthetic and philosophical differences. Mental Turbulence can also be explored in relation to Cognitive Dissonance and the ability to transcend, transform and integrate through nuance. In this way, the images expose ways and perform as physical proofs for human understanding to consider difference and congruence in algorithmic learning.
The framed terrains refer to the Real, meaning that which is and becoming. The beingness of the camera as a reflexive imprinting tool, records impressions of what was there as well as the material of the film processes itself. Ontological significances in analogue photograph relative to digital imaging, painting and Artificial Intelligence have relationship to histories of visual literacy and mythology. Therefore the embodied processes of visual material raises questions in the technocratic times of screen imaging and reconstituted images from digital databases. The analogue process is emphasised in the final images. In this way, memories and the subconscious are brought to the viewing field, and viewers are faced with sensual, textural, abstract forms speaking to the vitality of Beauty.
A first look may deceive the viewer into believing the images are paintings. Repeated looking reveals forms of pattern recognition within the viewer’s awareness. While pattern recognition is often discussed in Artificial Intelligence, the images remind viewers of the embodied ability to extract and invent new, imaginary forms through their afferent nervous systems. Painters such as Katsushika Hokusai, Gai Wang, DaVinci, Van Gogh, and Pollock often used water to depict visible and ethereal flows. Today’s machine-translated representations from NASA’s imaging technology, geological terrain mapping, and medical imaging processes became common referents during technocratic times. Kodak Gold film was selected for its reference to the everyday use of analog photography. Magenta and Amber’s hues were emphasised after film scanning. Magenta is understood as a unique facet of human vision, created in the mind and not existing on objective frequency wavelengths. Amber (chasmal) is a hue and resin related to the electron. The material of Amber can be negatively charged. While today’s view of ancient folk medicine considers the healing properties of Amber, a pseudo-scientific electrical conductor, accumulated sap hardened over time subtly interacts with electronics, such as blue-tooth headphones. In these often-overlooked nuances, the series points to the immediacy and malleability of Vision through Images relating to humanity. Whereas the notion of humans being part of nature was once new, the idea that all creation is part of nature often overlooks differences of significance. While photography serves as a mediary tool along a spectrum often contextualized as containing painters and bodies on one end and algorithms and copies on the other, the references in the 1:1 results of exposing film through a rangefinder camera point to the sense of Place within Time and Memory. The viewers’ nervous system, informed by being there, becomes a critical element versus sampled copies A.I. relies upon. The inability to step in the same river twice, made known by Heraclitus, becomes a weight on scales of values and tonality for how far and deep learning can be carried forth with tools. The river or flow constantly replenishing itself represents an apophatic and imaginary way to understand the difference. In the reflexive process of making the exposures, the images concentrate on proposed divides between vision, imagination, psyche, and reality.
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