The Pond of Tranquility

Matthew Day Jackson, Reflections of the Sky, 2010

With presentation cue's to Monet's Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond Jackson's Reflections of the sky depicts a surface area of the moon that has been rendered by laser etching gypsum board (wallboard or Drywall) - a mass-produced material often used within domestic interiors. The etched pits and troughs that create the images surface topography also retain a gritty interference quality that exists somewhere between the production process and the transmission reception of such distant images.

Folding Space

Riyo Nemeth, Fold II, 2010

Rendered in physical space, Riyo Nemeth composes and records the Photoshop gradient affect by printing and folding a sheet of paper.

Bead me up Scotty

Mirror Universe by sculptor Devorah Sperber

Location, location, location

Megan Scheminske, You are here (ongoing)

Flickr City

Daniel Canogar Horror Vacui, 1999

Vacui's printed wallpaper instillation of repetitive hands invokes the experience of haptic technology through virtual environments that Vacui describes as 'the obsessive search for the tactile'.

Mark Pernice & Christian Hanson, Photo Booth Mask, 2010

Originally a distorted portrait captured using Apple's Photo Booth application Pernice and Hanson construct the recorded image distortion as a three-dimensional mask.

Reality bites in the dentist theatre

Mark Lyon from his Landscape for the people series

Hazy Meadows: For a few moments as I awoke everything felt ok, then I remembered.

Shore to be Shore!

Stephen Shore, West Third Street, Parkersberg, West Virginia, May 16, 1974

Found an interesting video link the other day that got me on to thinking about Michael Polanyi's tacit knowledge and photos amongst other things. The link is a short documentary entitled American Beauty about the Photographer Stephen Shore who describes elements of his practice. Shores methodology was the bit that subsequently reminded me of Polanyi's famous aphorism "We know more then we can tell".

With a certain sense of irony Shore (in his own words) describes a 'wordless' thinking that takes place during the creation of one of his photographs.

"Most people presume thinking has to do with words that are either spoken or thought, where as visual thinking does not have these words"

Shore goes on to inform us that he spent ten years learning the formal properties of photography. Because of this sustained period of learning Shore comments that he does not (consciously) need to think about these formalistic devices when taking photos. Similar to the forging of a 'tacit knowing' much of the previous conscious picture making strategies have receded into Shores subconscious, leaving mostly instinctual decisions. By essentially freeing the mind from directly thinking about these elements of the work Shore is able to 'think' about where he is going with the picture. This and other descriptions by Shore appear comparable to an iterative form of learning, common to the properties of tacit knowledge.

Other things:

Shore utilizes the inherent qualitative aspects of the large format photograph such as clarity and detail for example. These qualities provide Shore with the visual representation of what he describes as a 'heightened state of awareness,' equally pertinent toward his interest with a clear and focused attention of the everyday world.

One particular insight by Shore regarding the experience of time through the photographic image made me think of the photograph and its relationship to reality. Shore explains the speed with which we experience a photographic image when looking at the print (normally a few secs) - compared with the actuality of time that can reside within a photograph (exposure time). The experience of time through a photograph is allusive to us although visually acknowledgeable, as Shore summaries in saying "there is a sense of time being compressed in a photo". It is this reminder of how image and reality differ that got me thinking about my own interest in the prominence of image over reality.

"The camera in all its manifestations is our god, dispensing what we mistakenly take to be truth. The photograph is the modern world" - Thomas Lawson

With this in mind it's amusing to consider the photographic exposure length as having the prevailing influence upon the time with which we can only experience the images depiction of reality. Or a kind of synesthesia where the exposure length maybe experienced as 'weight', here a seven-minute exposure compared to that of a two second would feel lighter! There's possibly an artwork in here somewhere!