SITUATIONS #90 - #100 / Cluster: Immersive
Aram Bartholl » Hassan Elahi » Adrian Flury » Noémie Goudal » Brenna Murphy » Ed Ruscha » & others
Exhibition: 23 Sep – 26 Nov 2017
Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstr. 44+45
8400 Winterthur
+41 (0)52-2341060
info@fotomuseum.ch
www.fotomuseum.ch
temp. closed
This current cluster SITUATIONS/Immersive (SITUATION #90 to #100) is devoted to the cross-media phenomenon of immersion. Photographs, films and virtual realities can absorb our perceptions and at the same time curtail our awareness of the real environment. Today, we have digital networks and multi-layered, interwoven visual worlds through which we constantly navigate with our smartphones and touchscreens. The immersive expansion of photographic media and practices, but also the state of the immersive in itself, became a central form of perception in our mediatized world. We live in data clouds. Our identities are constantly morphing into profiles made up of preferences, searches and links, which are increasingly eluding our control.
With works by MSHR, Aram Bartholl, Alan Bogana, Hasan Elahi, Adrian Flury, Noémie Goudal, Kamilia Kard, Ed Ruscha and a workshop by Karim Ben Khelifa in cooperation with Hochschule Luzern.
In 2002, American media artist Hasan Elahi was detained and interrogated by the FBI on his return flight to the USA. The reason? Suspected of terrorism. For more than six months, he was repeatedly called in by the authorities. Any foreign travel had to be notified in advance. This sparked the idea of undertaking a self-surveillance project, which he named Tracking Transience (2003–) and in which he has been documenting his life online over the past 14 years. Years before the flood of images via smartphone, flickr and instagram began to inundate the web, Elahi set about consistently photographing all the places he visited. He uploads his pictures to his website, where his current location can always be pinpointed via GPS. In Elahi’s wall-spanning photomontage Prism v2.0.5 (2017) a variety of immersive systems clash. Huge black and white aerial images show the NSA headquarters – one of the world’s hubs of international surveillance. These are contrasted by a small-scale mosaic of photographs featuring Elahi’s own self-surveillance.
More by Hasan Elahi: http://elahi.org/
The images in Adrian Flury’s A Place I've Never Been seem flickering and wobble. The effect is reminsicent of some late nineteenth century proto-cinematic devices in which single, static images are condensed to create motion sequences. This basic principle of cinematographic illusion lies at the heart of Flury’s photomontage video. The experimental filmmaker trawled hundreds of online holiday snaps shared on image hosting sites and travel blogs featuring the sights of Athens. He then animated this digital archive to create a visual flow that blurs the boundaries between photographic image and cinematic aesthetic. A finely attuned soundtrack accentuates the perspectival and temporal shifts between the individual images. A Place I've Never Been transfigures places into a new, media-driven reality that lures the viewer into its very core.
More by Adrian Flury: adrianflury.com
Kindly supported by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and Temperatio Foundation.