It was around ten years
after being given my first SLR camera that I finally began to take an
interest in studying photography, as opposed to simply using my camera
as a tool to record images of places and events that I felt were
significant to me alone. In the same way that I had once wanted to
understand how I had become strong through seemingly random training
and lack of structure, I now wanted to take my unconscious and random
non-approach to photography and to develop it into something focused,
thoughtful and with greater purpose.
Initially, my ideas for
projects were clumsy attempts that involved simply transposing
certain scientific/rationality concepts from written ideas onto the
photographic medium. At this time it was clear to me that I had
something concrete that I was passionate about and wished to express
to others, but I lacked the means by which to do it at all, let alone
coherently or artistically. I felt that the complexity of the ideas
was too great to be compressed into a form that lacked words,
especially considering that my subject of interest was often
something that didn't immediately lend itself to visual
representation to begin with, such as cognitive biases for example.
At some point I think I
gave up in trying to make my interests match my preferred
medium, but my love or attachment to photography is what made me
continue seeking a way to do so. But when I left the house in the
summer of 2013 I had no pre-defined subject or idea which I wished to
express, and instead went on the search for one in my local
surroundings. Having moved from London almost a year earlier, to the
small dormitory town located
within viewing distance of the plastic paradise known as Disney, I
asked myself the important question 'what is particular or specific
to this environment?'. With fresh eyes, or at least with a different
pair of glasses on, I looked at my town, searching for something of
note in amongst everything that had become so extremely familiar.
Walking up and down the
long, rigid roads reminded me of how strange the town had at first
seemed to me, and deliberate focus on this aspect of its design
re-awakened and slowly reinforced a sense of intrigue that remained
with me until the day I left. It was the streets that had captured
my imagination, but it was the trees lined along them that I finally
decided to concentrate on and to make the subject of my first series.
The systematic placement
of each tree served as a reflection of the overall design of the
town, and as I would later come to conclude, it was a reflection of
Man's nature in general.
Bussy-Saint-Georges is a
real-life SimCity, where a small inventory of building shapes and
colours are pasted into place and connected via a lattice of
confusingly similar roads that appear as a modern attempt at
perfection through symmetry. Given a chance to start it all again
from scratch, it appeared that man had decided that form was
paramount, and that the perfect form was the straight line itself.
Being careful not to
ignore the biophilia
of the new residents, each street was endowed with a set of trees
which ran in rows along their length, with sometimes as many as four
rows per street, two for each side of the road. Mindful of the
perfect design and the grand scheme of things, the workers took their
time in making sure that each tree had a uniform distance between
itself and the next, and a tolerance of up to two feet was
established.
Having ruled out
depicting each street as an ultra-long panorama made by stitching
hundreds of images together, I settled on photographing each
individual tree in sequence, starting at one end of the street and
ending at the other, or the point at which the sequence ended,
whichever came first.
I made an effort to
exclude all traffic and pedestrians from my compositions, but opted
to leave in other non-important elements such as parked cars that
often made it difficult to continue shooting in the loosely
standardised way I had chosen. I felt that it wasn't necessary to be
as strict and rigid with each photo like is evident in the work of
Bernd and Hilla Bescher, as my focus was on the effect created by
viewing a large number of images in sequence, where the role of any
individual photo was to provide further support the group to which it
belonged. Furthermore, my interest was never in creating a
typological piece, but instead to create a sort of snapshot of
specific areas within a designated locality.
During this period,
photography became an instrument with which to collect evidence, in
the same way that a crime scene photographer collects evidence, or
records the scene for its information content and not its aesthetic
content.
An example of one of the
montages from this series can be seen here in the form which it was
originally intended:
While I carried out this
work I had the notion that a transhumanist society was inevitable,
based on the many ways in which man changes himself and his
surroundings, from small modifications like body marking and use of
simple tools to augment abilities, to more pronounced changes like
reconstructive surgery, and the mass extraction and transportation of
materials such as stone and fossil fuels. This initial project
therefore serves as a relatively gentle (perhaps too subtle?)
introduction to this idea, further backed up by other works which
have grown out of an exploration of themes such as Nature and the
nature of man.
I
chose to create this video for a number of reasons; the photographs
being in digital form easily lent themselves to manipulation in many
different ways, and the idea of passing information through numerous
filtering processes in order to highlight the changes was something I
had already thought about. The second reason for using the
photographs to produce an entirely different result came from the
idea that each medium has its own specificities, and that in fact,
just as passing dirt through a sieve is one example of a filtering
process, each different medium that exists acts a filter too. This
basic idea was introduced to me through the book 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman, who was in turn influenced by the
philosopher Marshall McLuhan, known for the phrase “the medium is the message”.
Although
conceived at different times, these two similar ideas bled into
one-another, and have come to form what is currently my concept of
'Environment'.
This
video represents just one of many possible derivatives of the source
material. The photos themselves are intended to be viewed in real
life, either as part of large-scale montages, or as individually
framed prints arranged in order.
In an earlier experiment I decided to take the Ten Commandments and to pass them through Google Translate via every possible language from English and back again, to see how the translation process would affect them. During this process it was evident that there were many opportunities for errors to arise which would simply become compounded as the process continued to play out.
Another idea I have, of
which this video is a first iteration, is to take an image and to pass it through various processes in succession. For
example, an image can be changed/translated/re-interpreted as a
sound, and likewise a sound can be processed to become an image using
similar software. Colours on a computer are represented by numbers,
numbers can be represented by letters or positions and so on, an
image being printed produces a sound which can be recorded and used
to represent that unique event.
Each process has its own
characteristics which influence the final output, as well as our
experience of the information which has been processed and is being
presented – digital photography uses the presence of photons in
order to induce a unique combination of binary numbers inside a
computer, which can then present this information visually. Behind
the press of a button and the click of a shutter, there are all
manner of abstractions and computations going on without our
awareness of them. And likewise, this is true of our own visual
perception of the world.
I
have deliberately created thousands of abstractions, each an
abstraction in itself, and combined them into video form (another
abstraction), and then uploaded it to Youtube where it has undergone
further degradation, and perhaps more importantly, it has been
released into an entirely different environment.
The
importance of environment or chosen medium becomes increasingly
apparent when one works across multiple platforms and means of
expression, ranging from the written (typed) word, to the printed
image. For example, the default view on Youtube places the video
slightly to the left of the screen, which in turn effects the feeling
of 'balance' in the video, which consequently caused me to switch the
positioning of the images, so that now the JPEG is on the left with
the pixelated equivalent on the right.
The
post-production work behind this video is much greater than the many
hours I spent taking the original photographs, although ironically,
the time spent creating this piece was dramatically reduced by
certain software that allowed me to automate many of the repetitive
tasks that made up the bulk of the work. Before I discovered this
software however, while clicking almost endlessly with the right
button on my tired mouse, it occurred to me that in order to produce
a piece intended to be a reflection on filtering effects and the
characteristics of a medium, I would have to become machine-like
myself. In the end though, my repetitive interventions were only
necessary insofar as beginning or restarting the the software that I
had programmed to do the real work for me.
Beginning
with the raw files taken from the camera I then processed them using
Adobe CameraRaw in order to give a full-size reproduction in JPEG
format. A copy of this JPEG file was then resized in order to save
rendering time, as each of the 732 total images would then have to be
processed with AudioPaint in order to produce an equivalent WAV file
for each. The full-size JPEGS were also reduced to a size of 6x9
pixels before saving a further copy at this size. The colours from
each 6x9 image were then copied and pasted one by one into a template
made of 6x9 squares, although with a total size of 635x950 pixels.
This reproduction was then saved as a PNG file which can then be
infinitely scaled up or down without negatively affecting its appearance. If I
had manually created each PNG file using the mouse only and without
ever making a mistake, the minimum amount of clicks it would take
would be around 158112 – 4 clicks to select a single colour,
to change the tool and to paste into the template, repeated 54 times
to fill each square in the 6x9 template, repeated 732 times for each
image in the series.
The
final MP4 file is 264 MB and 1 minute 13 seconds long.
Each
full-size JPEG is between 2.22 and 5.12 MB.
Each
PNG file is between 6.37 and 8.98 kb.
Each
WAV file is between 17.2 and 34.4 kb.
The
size of a real tree is approximately 0 kb.
