Hypervision
2018
Honours Project for Bachelor of Design (Hons) with a major in photography at Massey University, Wellington.
How can the culture and apparatus of our contemporary digital landscape be constructed and deconstructed visually?
In 2009, Fred Ritchin, wrote that “the digital inhabits the land of in-between, and beyond.” My work responds to this idea, and develops it further, considering the digital as an ephemeral, unknowable space, which photos inhabit, in states of transience and latency. Working within the genre of conceptual, fine art photography, Hypervision explores how an aesthetic of the digital could be visualised; one which highlights the over-saturated nature of online image culture and the coded building blocks of the digital image.
Focusing on the malleability and materiality of these images, this project is a reflection on how we experience photographs in virtual spaces; looking at what we see and how we see it by deconstructing the technical elements of the image and exploring the nature of popular stock imagery. The entire form and layout of the publication, with two front covers and layouts which bleed into each other, emulates the cyclical, networked virtual environment. Eva Respini (2018) wrote that a “condition of simultaneity and the flattening of planes is characteristic of our digital age,” illustrating how digital images exist in a state that is both condensing and expanding. The solid materiality of the publication contrasts the ephemerality of the imagery, and these states of polarised dualism is a key part of this project; a digital image is both latent and omnipresent, nowhere and everywhere.
Following the theme of duality, Hypervision is split into two series, expanding and exposing the plane of the image. Since the imagery is generally abstract, a short contextual essay is included in the centre of the book, giving an overview to the areas of research which informed this project and to guide a viewers reading of the work. In both series, I have used photo collage to invoke our experiences of images in digital contexts; the way that they blur together and overlap, always existing in relation to each other and never in isolation. One series expands on the framework of the digital image, exposing the code which forms the photograph. The subject of these images presents light, the foundational element of any photograph, in cohesion with the digital building blocks. Meanwhile, the other series reflects on digital image culture by appropriating stock images, each image an amalgamation of many. Endless, bland and commercial, stock images present uncanny realities which I have layered to create fantasy landscapes; speaking to the digitals endless capacity for new material and reimagination.