The exploitation of the planet’s resources has left deep scars in nature and now the exploitation of the human mind through data mining is leaving deep scars in our psyches, too. I aim to depict the material as well as spiritual wastelands beyond the world that global corporations have carved out around and inside us. Those scars are where I find material for my compositions, my inspiration and hope for the future.
Ambiguous Technology
How does the spread of technology into every domain of life change the way we perceive the world? How does it change the way we perceive art? It would take me many lifetimes to get a complete understanding of the bricolage of computer chips, hard drives, programs, algorithms, cameras and printers that I employ every day to make my work. It is as if my daily practice is floating atop a giant ocean of impenetrable knowledge. In such a light, the modernist promise of laying bare all my artistic means of production seems impossible to live up to. In the digital age, the secret techniques of the artists are also secrets for the artists themselves.
An Aesthetics of Ambiguity
A rich set of aesthetic fields of tension – between proliferating organic forms and pixel noise, sharp geometric planes and meaty substances, porous and soft surfaces, order and chaos, the micro- and macro-realms, composition and decomposition, inside and outside, nature and technology – permeates the work. My pictures are designed to appear familiar at first but to increasingly withdraw the ground from beneath the viewer’s feet once he or she studies them more carefully. Is this world being constructed or destroyed? Were these pictures taken from space or with a microscope? Are they landscapes or mindscapes? While appearing abstract, the pictures can perhaps better be said to employ an aesthetics of ambiguity.
Echos of the Romantic Era
My aesthetic sensibility reverberates in the Romantic landscape paintings of the early nineteenth century. Like our digital age, the Romantic era was a period of transition. At the time, a growing network of canals and railways condensed space and shook people’s cognitive mapping. The Romantics reacted with apocalyptic visions that felt at once epic and claustrophobic. Today, the world wide web condenses our mental space with an endless inflow of information and reconfigures our cognitive maps at ever greater speeds. While I’m using cutting edge digital tools, I find that I’m reacting to my time in much the same way as the Romantics did two centuries earlier.
Photogrammetry and the Ruins of Reality
Photography is the raw material of my practice. I photograph small, insignificant objects and details – discarded things, old plastic, driftwood, a part of a crumbling wall – and use photogrammetry software to turn these objects into three-dimensional computer models. I’m drawn to the ruinous aesthetic that results when the algorithm is unable to properly calculate the 3D coordinates of the objects, producing meshes that look like torn spiderwebs.
Picturing the Unknowable
In my work, photography stands for the normal, everyday vision of the world. It’s a starting point rather than an end point to me, the beginning of a chain of operations designed to lead towards the perception of a more ambiguous, abstract dimension. Ever since I have called myself an artist, I have systematically cut, mirrored, blurred, distorted and transformed photographs to that effect – to squeeze out something more, to generate a content by ruining it.
My alchemy aims to turn despair into hope, dissolution into resolution, the lost into the found, the impossible into the necessary, waste into beauty, the small into the epic, the discarded and useless into art. Just as we reconfigure the fragmentary events of the bygone day into new constellations when we are dreaming, my artistic practice reconfigures fragments of the world into new compositions. And just as the unconscious attaches itself to these dream configurations, the repressed dimension of the world – its scars and waste – inscribes itself into my pictures.