Quadruplex.
This was a group show at S1 Gallery. The Group statement is visible on the second image. The accompaniment to my work is copy and pasted below.
An Instinctive Unconscious Panorama of Personal Experiences
I am interested in the digital phenomena and how our culture of image recording has changed through the evolution of photographic mediums. With any cultural shift it is important for it to be acknowledged and considered wherever possible. Recording is now something that we all take for granted. Are we entering into a culture of digital verification? Whereby our videos or photographs are self indulgent testimonies stating ‘I was there!’ uploaded onto any user-generated network. Or is it possible to find meaning in collective content?
Will we leave behind a rich database of visuals that portray the human experience? Or will digital information get lost within in itself whereby it is so over saturated it become impossible to find anything of substance or of tangible physical quality like previous analogue mediums such as the film negative.
This video exploits the contemporary digital culture of obsessive over documentation of our lives. The appropriated video footage within the piece consists of video clips recorded on mobile phones and digital cameras at a football match. At a crucial moment within the game a penalty kick was awarded to one team. This allowed their supporters to instinctively ready their phone or camera recorders in preparation for a decisive moment in time. Unconsciously everybody who filmed at that moment made it possible to make a instinctive unconscious panorama of personal experience.
DVD on Monitor : 6 minutes
Stop-gaps of Imagery within a Digital Culture
The current I-generation treats the medium of photography in a different way to those before: through a Post Modern methodology. We are now over exposed to the medium of the Image. I am concerned with the notion that contemporary image-making is something that has become disposable; whereby the digital images that are created are rarely made into tangible, physical objects. After a cultural shift from the film generation to a digital age it is important for us to reassess our position on image-making and our motivations.
In this work I interview my former manager by whom I was employed as a camera salesman for a high street retailer. As we both have personal art practices relating to image-making, we open a discourse into how our time at the shop changed our approach to photography.
I am also looking at the phenomena of the disposable camera and making the parallel between the cavalier approaches to image-making, how it may be similar to digital photography and how both mediums changed the accessibility of photography.
Presenting the work on a purpose built projection screen, I house the original cameras used within the piece. There is also an investigation into the correspondence between the conceptual assessment of image-making and the literal theoretical assessment of the image that is presented to the viewer.
Video Projection : Interview with John Oshea 52 minutes
DVD Monitor 1 : Vectoscope
DVD Monitor 2 : YC Waveform
DVD Monitor 3 : Collection of Failed Negatives
