Hyper-Images

Work in Progress

»The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet.«

The objects depicted in the images on the right have been found as artefacts in the photographic archive of the CERN. The CERN had made them accessible to the public as »the subject of many of the photos has been lost in the sands of time and the researchers can’t work out what’s what.« The idea is basically to regain the lacking information by activating the crowd.

I first found out about the CERN archive when I was reviewing the portfolio of David Fathi at les Rencontres d’Arles and he was already working with the archive, generating a docu-fiction-story about the »Pauli-effect«, recently published as »Wolfgang« by Skinnerboox. I was immediatley intrigued by the fact that the CERN was using the WWW to »reactivate« the images. They were using exactly that same system that was conceived in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN in order to transfer and link huge amounts of information in real-time. The system that has – in only the past 25 years of its existence – reshaped the way we communicate, learn, work and has thus disrupted many of the so-called »old industries« and enables to build new ones.

My work is highly influenced by media-practice and -theory and I’m very interested in how photographic images are distributed, networked and informed nowadays. To me, a digital photographic file is fluid, especially from a conceptual point of view. It can have many more meanings than the one it initially depicts when taken, and it shows that potential everyday in our image-feeds, generated by algorithms. Considering the fact that the images I selected and appropriated from the archive only depict objects and abstract imagery that have lost their initial purpose as they come without titles, they have become something they’ve never intended to be: beautifully crafted and presented industrial sculptures. All of them might have been part of some of the particle accelerators the CERN uses to understand what matter is made of. The way they’re photographed directly links them to the tradition of »Neue Sachlichkeit«, even if it’s dubious if the photographers who initially took the photos intended them to look precisely that way. My work is not only to find them in the vast digital archive, but rather to »develop« them by re-framing and retouching them, extincting all details that allow a clear reading about the actual size of these objects. To me, these photographic sulptures serve as reminders about how deeply technology is interwoven with our daily lives.

The work is on-going. It might become the form of a book, and I’m currently experimenting with silkscreen-printing the motives on glass, as well as creating nitro brass-rubbings that I re-scan and then produce large-scale silver-gelatine-prints, using the re-analog®-technique.