Macroblock Study (64x64 pixel selections)

A study of macroblock artifacts induced by selectively replacing characters in FlashPix (.FPX) files made with a prepared Kodak DC215.

Statement:

Sometimes I’m struck by the resemblance some of these artifacts have to retro video game graphics. After scouring the digital detritus of corrupted image files, these digital artifacts of a staged intervention, I get the irrational sensation that we are actually living in an elaborate self-made video game. Nothing mediated is real; the graphics have just gotten so good that we’ve mistook the imitation for the real thing. It’s not like it happened over night, we brought this upon ourselves one upgrade in resolution at a time. Then my thoughts turn to that world we covered up, lurking somewhere beneath its simulated, digital double. Is there anything left of that reality? How would we know it? How can we see anything without first looking through the distorted lenses of a conscious formed by the hands of media technologies? I once made a conscious effort to see everything as though it were real–to see it without associations, as it was before me, immediate. I would be somewhere and suddenly become aware that I was seeing my surroundings as though I were looking at photographs in a magazine or watching scenes from a movie. When I became aware of this distancing, I would fight against it. When your first impression of a thing is through media, it’s difficult to see it as-it-is without first relating it to that mediated experience. That first encounter–that experience, sensation, object, or person–isn’t with the Real, but something else, mediated, and distant. What these macroblock artifacts remind me of is that sensation which is with me not only when I visit any new place, but present in even in very familiar ones. I am not where I am, but where I am going or where I was, occupying a space different from the one I am physically occupying, I am distinctly aware that my perception is interfering with my ability to be where I am now. In the unraveling of the digital veneer of mediated life, perhaps there is someway to become aware of what is really here, to become caught between the illusions of past and future. Of course, this is something which cannot happen during the process of making, or even viewing, but must be found outside the experience of the work, through it.