Selfmade (Colin Graham 2013)
Self-portraiture is a form that seems to offer an insight into the ‘I’ and to imply that the self is coherent, organic and complete. But self-portraiture in painting has always had contained within it the strange doubleness of a mirrored self-scrutiny – and so the self-portrait already works as a prefiguration of the contortions of the self in a digital age.
‘Selfmade’ uses digital photography as the foundation for a way to think about the fear that the ‘self’ may be a construct made from our own perception and by rapidly changing social and technological codes. Using that pre-existing capacity within self-portraiture for a critical examination of the self, this work thinks about whether it is possible to have a coherent identity in a digital age.
The camera, in all its forms, is ubiquitous. Everyday life is intertwined with a stream of digital code translating the image to the photograph and back again, simulating the materiality of the real via the language of the computer. Living increasingly simulated lives, we construct narratives and characters for ourselves in our online and offline environments, living by ‘parables of the virtual’.
‘Selfmade’ creates new versions of the self-portrait by entering the processes of digital photography. Rather than recoiling from the estranged, ‘inauthentic’ self of the age of surveillance and virtuality, ‘Selfmade’ enters the digital stream. Its images are a result of the inhabitation of the digital image by an active, self-analysing consciousness in search of the remnants of a recognizable and whole sense of being. ‘Selfmade’ takes back control of the self-image by mimicking and contorting the very photographic technologies through which we now create ourselves with.
The digital sculptures at the centre of ‘Selfmade’ are captured instants from a complex artistic process that builds a series of material and virtual versions of ‘self’. This begins with a bust created by covering the body in alginate and plaster, resulting in negative and positive sculptural forms. Repurposed game console technology records the spatial forms of these objects and allows for a virtual reality version of self to be created and manipulated. Instants in the rendering of this virtual self are captured, so that ‘Selfmade’ reveals and participates precisely in the moments at which a digital identity is created.
‘Selfmade’ creates an imagery that walks the line between the authentic and the virtual, the real and the representational, the photograph and the sculpture. By re-authoring the digital image from the inside it looks for the vestiges of agency and artistry in the simulated ocularity of new technology.
https://www.belfastexposed.org/digital/portfolios/peter-evers-futures-artist/
Irresistable Drift (Text Peter Evers 2014)
In 2014 as I was closing my research on the Selfmade project I discovered the Perceiving Systems tresearch lab at the Max Planck institute in Tübingen. This was the inspiration and subject matter for the exhibition.
Perspective
The research lab were looking at how to accurately digitally capture and replicate the movement of subcutaneous fat. Their research videos when view through a different methodology were perfect aligned representations of themes I was working through.
These themes, hypotheses and assumptions were
It was established 'we were the product' for social media companies.
That decisions, truth and identity were becoming less coherent.
Further that we were passively sacrificing our social coherence for irresponsible convenience.
There was an evangelical zeal for new technologies as the only solution pathway. Tech was the cure-all the elixir, the only possible remedy for ills.
There seemd a general assumption that human ethics were evolving at the same rate as technological discovery.
Precaution was perceived as a barrier to progress, we were entitled to ignore how these technologies were determining our lived experience, rooting themselves with complexity through our infrastructures.
I was asserting, in this moment, that a singularity had already emerged but was not a terminator or other end days avatar rather it was hubris, the decimation of truth and machine learning.
Works
The Max Planck research data was from 2 sources;
Sensor motion capture for 3d data
Through video footage.
The human subjects had targeting grids applied to their skin, minimal clothing for maximising visible flesh for the capture of movement. The subjects would then perform a variety of actions; jumping, jiggling, kicking, punching, dancing, swaying etc.
The subjects knew that the purpose was to capture the motion of subcutaneous fat and seemed unmoved by the presence of the small video camera. The imagery was therefore devoid of emotion, they were literally going through the motions. As if they were marionettes, or captives being dragged from a dungeon to perform for captors. Expressionless, they seemed to have passively surrendered all their agency and this was a very effective representation of many interconnected themes for my research.
The exhibition 'Irresistible Drift' transposed the Max Planck research to an exhibition space where it would be contextualised to represent my assertions. The space became a kind of factory where the subjects identity and agency were transgressed through apparent capture, dehumanisation and commodification.
Upon entering the space the viewers pass through an industrial laser scanner, to induce the feeling that they too had been appropriated.
Two large screens in the space depict a process where the subjects vacantly perform, are mapped and reproduced. The models are then multiplied/cloned and their captured expressionless behaviors modified to become uncanny and discomfiting contortions, their behavior rewritten to demonstrate the ownershio of the form had been bequethed.
As a post script I would add that both Selfmade and Irresistible Drift were conceived many years prior to Cambridge Analytica, Brexit and the documentary 'The Social Dilemma'. This is not to claim any prescient powers on my part (My work is research just a synthesis of existing works) rather it is meant to reinforce that we should include precaution prior to the adoption of technologies that will determine so much, that humans are a finite intelligence and that trust is earned. That there is an opportunity before complexity emerges to regulate ethically. To ask ‘should we?’
Photo-Construction 2020
In 2015 I began teaching lens based media on a college design program. It was fascinating to learn how generous the formal systems and frameworks of design were. How well the method worked for sense-making and how with the use constrained compostional systems thousands of opportunities for expression would open up.
These systems and frameworks are found in music, light and the natural world. They profoundly echo together.
I wished to access the simple delights these universal codes offered up to designers and painters. Early notables for me being Karel Martens and Josef Albers and their beautiful colour compositions.
What would the principles they use look like when applied to light and photography? As you move from 3d to 2d, how would forms be extended?
For this a visual system or lighting composition framework was deployed. Any object in the field had inherent symmetry or harmonies. This created multiple new forms through the interplay of shadow, highlight and object.