Trevor Paglen's The Last Pictures

In light of our discussion around digital imaging and the archive in the Photo II class today, below is the link I promised detailing Trevor Paglen's project that was referred to.

Commissioned by public art organization Creative Time, The Last Pictures marks a distant satellite with a record from the historical moment from whence it came. Artist Trevor Paglen collaborated with materials scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a micro-etched disc with one hundred photographs, encased in a gold-plated shell, designed to withstand the rigors of space and to last for billions of years. Inspired by years of conversations and interviews with scientists, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers, the images chosen for The Last Pictures tell an impressionistic story of uncertainty, paradox, and anxiety about the future.

Read more about the project HERE.

Recent Exhibitions Featuring the Work of Aitor Orti and Chris Engman

There were two pretty fantastic sounding exhibitions featured on the re-title.com newsletter for Photography, Film and Video this week (this is a great mailing list to be on, by the way, as they also send out artist opportunities for grants, exhibitions, residencies, education opportunities, etc.).  In light of our conversation regarding the complex relationship around art and photography and the various modes of practice that have become prevalent, the work of Orti and Engman seem particularly apt.

The press release for Ortiz describes his "unrelenting drive to tackle head-on the dilemma between representation and interpretation (perception). In doing so, he forges connections between the content of his images, the physical qualities of the supports he chooses for his works, and the position they occupy in the exhibition space. In consonance, Aitor Ortiz stakes out a broad scope for his work and the relations between the places he photographs, and the conscious and unconscious devices operating in the process of manipulating the image: the eye (interpretation, frame, decontextualisation,…), the photographic camera (focus/out-of-focus, optical distortion, transmission of movement…) and the brain (the limitations of an imperfect device in reading information and its empirical powers: association of concepts...). These relations come together in the exhibition space, where the physical experience once again transcends the actual content of the photographs and becomes part of a process of continuous interaction between representation and the perception of the beholder."

Aitor Ortiz, “NOÚMENOS 003”, 2013 
perforated aluminium plate on lightbox / Aluminum Lochblech auf Lichtbox 
40,9 x 40,9 inches / 104 x 104 cm, Edtion 1/2 (Sourced from re-title.com press release)

Read more about the work of Ortiz HERE.

Chris Engman, Double Skew, 2014
Digital pigment print
55 x 52.25 x 47 x 37.5 in (Image sourced from re-title.com)

The press release for Engman's exhibition, Ink on Paper, describes it as representing "a temporary shift in [his] artistic practice from photographic documentation of environmental installation phenomena—records of process and the passage of time—to a consideration of photographs themselves as an inherently false, mediated and distancing way to experience the world. By focusing not on outer constructions but on the photograph itself as a constructed challenge to perception, this new body of work continues Engman’s inquiry into the illusive and unknowable nature of reality.

Read more about the work of Engman HERE.