As an undergraduate student at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the 1970’s I studied weaving with the great teacher from the Bauhaus, Trude Guermonprez. She encouraged my deconstructive approach to the creative use of the loom, and then encouraged my experimentation with video feedback, which led to my explorations in digital technology as I began to see the connections and links between ancient and contemporary technologies, especially regarding the function of the grid. Over the years, my work has evolved with the tools of the times, from the loom and video camera to Xerox machines and digital copiers to primitive scanners to sophisticated ones to early versions of Photoshop to digital cameras and the latest digital graphics programs. While I left the physical process of cloth construction behind long ago, it is clear that that part of my past, coupled with years living in Japan, my graduate study in art at UCLA, and my life-long engagement with photography and technology have informed and left their marks on the work I do today.
Although the dominant image-reproduction technologies are now digital rather than mechanical, the words of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, working in the early 20th Century, resonate with my interests and intentions:
…"Our eyes see very little and very badly - so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena. They invented the telescope…to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten…
…I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it."
geography: (literal translation from the Greek geografia) "to describe or write about the Earth"
geometry: (geos + metros) "to measure the Earth"
minutia: "the small, precise, or trivial details of something"
document: (from Latin documentum 'lesson, proof', 'written instruction, official paper') a piece of written, printed, or electronic matter that provides information or evidence or that serves as an official record.
algorithm: "a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations esp. by a computer"
bitmap: "a representation of a graphic image in computer memory consisting of rows and columns of dots, each corresponding to a pixel"
essence: "the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something ... that determines its character..."
More than working at the computer, I love to sit or walk outside, to enjoy the feeling of being surrounded by the sun or fog or rain, plants, insects, birds, water and sky, life in the moment, that I am sometimes lucky enough to be engulfed in, taken over by in a warm and visceral way that supersedes intellect. I also love the flattening filter, the frame that overlays this kind of experience when looking out a window from a building or a moving vehicle. Along with millions of others I am often driven to try to 'capture' what I see or feel by taking pictures.
My current work is an experiment in capturing a fragment of a fleeting moment, of abstracting from visual ephemera through the use of digital tools and systems. out of curiosity and a desire to make art objects. What happens when a small amount of information, taken systematically from a deliberately composed 'picture', is isolated and re-employed to make something else? Does the new 'picture' represent my experience of the initially captured moment better than the original photograph? At the very least, the familiarity and sentimentality often associated with photographic illusions of nature is relieved. At best, I think, we get to see, as Dziga Vertov put it almost a century ago, as only a machine can. And if the work is successful, it stands alone and also somehow brings us back to my initial experience without having to name it or visualize it or even specifically know it in a literal way.
The numbers of the titles indicate the frames as catalogued by the camera and the computer. The pieces are derived from the full frame of the initial photograph without cropping or adjustment. Once the photo has been taken, deliberate aesthetic decisions and manipulations have been avoided in order to more precisely document the intersection of the digital process with what I see when I put the camera to my eye.
