Exhibition
Bilder – ein kollektives Gedächtnis
The Eboran gallery presents a glimpse into the SpallArt photography collection.The american photographer Andrew Phelps has been invited to curate an exhibition from the prominent Austrian SpallArt collection.
Photographs from historical masters such as Berenice Abbott, Carleton Watkins, W.H. Jackson, Harry Callahan, Robert Capa and Eadweard Muybridge along with contemporary photographs from Erwin Wurm, Olaf Otto Becker, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and many more are presented in an interactive exhibition which contextualizes the many layers of social media and online image banks which influence the way we see and research photographs today.
In the late 1800s a new forensic theory called optography promised to revolutionize crime solving. Optography is the process of viewing or retrieving an optogram, an image burned onto the retina of the eye. A belief that the eye “recorded” the last image seen before death was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the extent that police photographed the victims’ eyes in murder investigations, hoping the theory was true.
The german physiologist Franz Christian Boll’s discovery of rhodopsin (or “visual purple”)—a photosensitive pigment present in the rods of the retina—showed that under ideal circumstances, the rhodopsin could be “fixed” like a photographic negative. We have all experienced this phenomenon when we stare at a high contrast image for several minutes and continue to see a negative of the shapes when we close our eyes. Though there is a scientific basis behind the idea, optography was repeatedly debunked as a forensic method.
It is not by chance that the interests in trying to “fix” these images was sparked in the age of the industrial revolution, the same era which brought us photography, in a time when Europe found itself enthralled in employing mechanics and science to bring order and explanation to a rapidly growing society. Fast forward over 100 years and we find ourselves in an era of collecting and saving images in a massive proportion, unimaginable even a few dozen years ago. The digital image, burned latent onto a hard drive, is in many ways as abstract and intangible as an image burnt into our retina.
If the internet can be seen as a collective archive of images and wikipedia as a collective consciences, then the algorithms that make up the shapes and forms are the “visual purple”, the latent images in a state of suspension. What happens when we reverse this process and start with the algorithm and search for the shapes and forms?
The technical process of this presentation of images out of the SpallArt collection is the making visible of these algorithms, a “digital visual purple”.
Each image in the selection is accompanied by a QR code. The URL of this QR code leads to a meta-level of the exhibition which compiles a complex selection of images which, according to Google Image Search, contain a near identical algorithm as the photograph on the wall. Though completely objective and mathematical in the search process, the images are generated based on considerations which are inherent in talking about visual aesthetics; contrast, composition, forms, color, etc. The camera has been called the “democratic” eye, not judging but using the physics of light and optics to record an object in front of the lens. These resulting images, gathered from random places on the web are a result of the democratic process of comparing digital algorithms.
Eboran Galerie
Ignaz-Harrer-Straße 38, 5020 Salzburg
www.eboran.at
Opening: September 28, 2016, 7 p.m.
Duration: September 29 till November 4, 2016
Artists
Berenice Abbott, James Craig Annan, Nobuyoshi Araki, Olaf Otto Becker, Felix Bonfils, Harry Callahan, Robert Capa, Franz Fiedler, Nguyen Ngoc Hanh, Bernhard Hosa, William Henry Jackson, Martin Klimas, Julia Meiners-Bölken, Eadweard Muybridge, Arnold Odermatt, Karl Peters, Agnes Prammer, Oskar Schmidt, Rosa Brückl & Gregor Schmoll, Bastian Schwind, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Miroslav Tichy, Burk Uzzle, Pablo Picasso & André Villers, Carleton Eugene Watkins, Erwin Wurm
