The postmodern literary critic Katherine Hayles re-conceptualized materiality as ‘the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies’. I tried to explain that we – as artists – can play with this constellation and consequently, even morph and transform the materiality of, for instance, paint. I tried to make them think not just in terms of material, but in terms of materiality, which is not fixed, but emerges from a set of norms and expectations, traditions, rules and finally the meaning the artist and writer add themselves. I responded with a counter question: Why do you think classic materials, such as paint or clay, are inherently warm or emotional? By doing so, I hoped to start a dialogue about how their work exists as a combination of physical characteristics and signifying strategies. One student even added that digital material is »cold.« In 2017, while teaching in another art school, within a – very traditional – department focused on painting and sculpture, two students separately asked me how art can exist in the digital, when there is an inherent lack of »emotion« within the material. patch (black on black) provided a key to the five encrypted institutions, while the patch for Behind White Shadows featured Lenna Sjööblom aka Lena Söderberg (glow in the dark on white) – a symbol for the ongoing, yet too often ignored racism embedded within the development of image processing technologies. This memory inspired me to re-start my research on resolutions, this time independently, under the title Beyond Resolution.īoth exhibitions came with their own custom patch – the i.R.D. His work often deals with photography as a mode of non-resolved vision and the production of invisible images. Paglen’s main field of research is mass surveillance and data collection. It reminded me of Trevor Paglen’s book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me (2007). I became fascinated with these obscure military spaces – where things happened beyond my understanding, yet in my direct field of perception. There, from the porch of a little cabin looking out over a dust road, I could feel the infrasound produced by bombs dropped on » Little Baghdad«, a Twentynine Palms military training ground just miles away on the slope of a hill. When I finally re-organised my finances, I went to the Mojave desert, to take some time. Bureaucratic management dropped me into a financial and ultimately emotional black hole. Unfortunately, and out of the blue, three days before my contract was due to start, my job was put on hold indefinitely. For this opportunity I immediately moved back from London to Amsterdam. The journey that Beyond Resolution also represents, started on a not so fine Saturday morning in early January 2015, when I signed the contract for a research fellowship to write a book on Resolution Studies. I unpack the ways resolutions organize our contemporary image processing technologies, emphasizing that resolutions not only organize how and what gets seen, but also what images, settings, ways of rendering and points of view are forgotten, obfuscated, or simply dismissed and unsupported. Together, the two exhibitions form a diptych that is this publication, titled Beyond Resolution.īy going beyond resolution, I attempt to uncover and elucidate how resolutions constantly inform both machine vision and human perception. At the heart of both shows lies research on compressions, with one central research object: the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm, the core of the JPEG (and other) compressions. On September 9, 2017, its follow-up » Behind White Shadows« also opened in Transfer. I opened the » institutions of Resolution Disputes« on March 28, 2015, as a solo show, hosted by Transfer Gallery in New York City. An introduction of my journey into resolution studies, as presented at #34C3, Leipzig, Germany || December 2017.
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