- Alice Pelot
Birch Contemporary
David Hanes, Fabienne Hess, Lorna Mills, Louise Noguchi
TENDERPIXELS.CORRUPTEDFILES
July 21 – August 27, 2016
What is the potential of a pixel as a conceptually and virtually malleable form? As early as 1966 in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up, we see the photographer protagonist lose his mind over a cluster of pixels revealing a potential murder. The further he zooms in on/blows up these pixels, the more unclear they become and the less he can put faith in his medium of photography as a form of documentation. In our contemporary cloud of images, we have more faith in their probable manipulation than in their truthful documentation.
Could a pixel actually be used to hide something such as the form of a body? Taking as her inspiration meta tagging and computational photography and well beyond the acceptance of photography’s documentarian failures, artist and writer Hito Steyerl suggests a way around surveillance and permanent cloud footage. In Steyerl’s video How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV. File (2013), she cheekily suggests that short of dropping off the grid we become smaller than the size of a pixel. More realistically, a pixel may be worn by or applied to the subject of an image as a mask or used to distort private information even as it travels at high digital velocity.
David Hanes, Fabienne Hess, Lorna Mills, Louise Noguchi
TENDERPIXELS.CORRUPTEDFILES
July 21 – August 27, 2016
What is the potential of a pixel as a conceptually and virtually malleable form? As early as 1966 in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up, we see the photographer protagonist lose his mind over a cluster of pixels revealing a potential murder. The further he zooms in on/blows up these pixels, the more unclear they become and the less he can put faith in his medium of photography as a form of documentation. In our contemporary cloud of images, we have more faith in their probable manipulation than in their truthful documentation.
Could a pixel actually be used to hide something such as the form of a body? Taking as her inspiration meta tagging and computational photography and well beyond the acceptance of photography’s documentarian failures, artist and writer Hito Steyerl suggests a way around surveillance and permanent cloud footage. In Steyerl’s video How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV. File (2013), she cheekily suggests that short of dropping off the grid we become smaller than the size of a pixel. More realistically, a pixel may be worn by or applied to the subject of an image as a mask or used to distort private information even as it travels at high digital velocity.