In Anthology, ideas of authorship, the permanence of imagery, and the limitations of photography are questioned and undermined. Using image data recovery programs, Meerdo excavates erased images from used memory cards he buys off of eBay and Craigslist. The life of a memory card – photographing, deleting, transferring, re-photographing – can generate incomplete data that is left behind. During the recovery process, these resurrected images become fragmented juxtapositions of composition and hue, creating a visual hybrid of a photograph as a representational image and a photograph as data. As photography has become the ultimate digital commodity, there remains a complicated relationship with indexicality. To imagine the hundreds of thousands of images that are created, stored, and erased every day places digital photography into both a neurotic and entropic disposition. By saving and storing thousands of these eradicated images, Meerdo further contextualizes photography’s dependence in technology while revealing our photographic collective mass as consumers. A project spanning six years, each disrupted image in Anthology is printed exactly as it was recovered through the restoration process. (via gallery | document)
- May 22 2013 | - Read More →
![Stacy Jo Scott, “Mobile Craft Utopia,” 2011, Fufu bowl, indigo-dyed sponge, 500 year old vietnamese pottery, iron oxide rock, mold, Anasazi pottery shard, fragment from Donald Judd’s studio wall, chakusa, hand-blown glass, Chartreuse liqueur, wild rabbit fur, iron tumbler, wax drip, earthenware marijuana pipes, iron lingam, Josef Albers color theory cards, book, photo of Shunryu Suzuki, 8″x16″x34″
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Stacy Jo Scott of the Craft Mystery Cult confessed, “Occult is always dealing with failure. That’s because we have this desire to speak of ideals, in terms of an ideal poetic space, but also in terms of utopic vision. Knowing the failures of past utopias, but still desiring Utopia. What results is the absurd: optimism in the face of futility.”
Nowhere Island, a project by Alex Hartley produced by Situations — the organization Doherty directs. As a travelling landmass, self-designated as a site belonging to no-country, Nowhere Island became another version of Utopia. Pulled by a tug boat through international waters, it visited many ports, acquiring 23,003 citizens over the course of a single year. There is much more to the story, of course, but I like situating this island in this post because the land mass in an of itself is what Doherty might call a “charismatic object,” a physical object both engaging and alluring to a public imagination. This object was capable of, again in Doherty’s words, “Nourishing the capacity for creative illusion, [such that a public was able] to act and think as though things were different.” In and of itself the island is not ethical, but it enables a public to explore their own Utopian expectations thereby exploring the problems that such ideals might subsequently create.
Now, open your hand.
In Tim Etchells words, “A Utopia of dispute might be better:”
Dear Citizens of Nowhereisland
as we stop in the shelter of a doorway in the thunderstormS. holds out his hand to check the rain.
The hand. The flatness of it. The open-ness. The question of it. The directness. The simplicity. The pragmatism. The straightforwardness. The sunshine.
And maybe just the repetition of this gesture, which must be as old as the hills, as old as the co-presence of hands and rain.
(read more of Etchells’ Nowhere Island response)
(via Open Engagement 2013 no. 02 : A Utopia of Dispute Might Be Better / Regarding Ethics & Failure : Bad at Sports)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/da6750f75b1b0ef40ad5c75ee2a52c02/tumblr_mn1wxxZcPv1qi69zao1_500.jpg)
