(Do You Know How Important You Are To The Universe?)
2012
Attempted Self Portrait (2012)
What I Say, What I Mean (2011)
(2012)
A sunset is a universally accepted image of beauty that people are often compelled to document. The normal mode of documentation today is by digital camera, which in turn allows the photographer to put the image on a computer, to be uploaded to the internet, to be viewed by someone else on their own computer screen. It strikes me as strange that something so subjective, experiential and impossible to capture as sunset is put through so many processes, that really turn it into something completely new. I believe that this way it loses a huge amount of its original qualities, but perhaps gains different qualities.
I took the sunset image used in this sculpture from Flickr, a large database of people’s photographs. I found an average sunset photograph and collected the colours that were used in it, listing them by their hex value number, which is how the computer and internet know what colour to display. For each colour I hung a piece of glass that matched it in a swarm or cloud that hangs in space. This exploded view of an original image takes the idea of putting the sunset through processes only a step further, but instead of leaving it as a two dimensional image trapped in a screen I have released it into a room, to demonstrate both the futility and creativity inherent in translation.
Inspired by the ‘all or nothing conceit of the bit’ and the reducible philosophy of digital information that makes words and colours into 1s, I wanted to visualise the otherwise intangible idea of the data cloud.
If I Could Sleep Forever (2011)
Alone Without You (2011)
