Decay - Basel


Curated by tz1PdHWyZmtWntsZmQjrDRRkfGvWSyRVBLoi
Jun 13, 2024 at 12:37 PM

Decay is a series entirely focused on crashing an iPhone to generate images that hint at the digital world that exists in the cameras that we all carry with us everywhere. Digital cameras are so common that we look at the outputs the same way we look at point and shoot cameras. **THE PROCESS** My body of work is made up of images produced using multiple generations of iPhones and effective manipulation of the panorama feature within the camera software. There are only 4 essential elements: a light source, the photo app, myself and an interlocutor - an arbitrary object that sits in the light path partially occluding the lens. The goal is to crash the processing software, rendering it unable to ‘read’ the image data in the way it was intended. Images are created by heavily controlling the path through which light gets to the camera lens by reflecting, refracting, or transmitting through the Interlocutor. Over the years I have used my fingers, money, credit card holograms, candy wrappers, the metallic closure of a sake bottle, water bottle wrappers, and whatever else has been at hand including the occasional bar napkin. The process is haphazard and, to some degree, parasitic. It makes full use of an unaltered consumer device with the goal of generating very specific crashes or glitches. **DECAY SERIES** Decay is my favorite output; to me, it is the most fun and a has the capacity to produce the most surprising results. Images that depart completely from anything recognizable as photography. As with most of my work, each shot is composed in a similar way: moving the iPhone and the Interlocutor relative to the available light. There are very similar repeated patterns of movement up and down and left and right with occasional contortions as the pattern of light sometimes reframes the window of available movement in the panorama app. The unique outputs are created by subtle changes in my movement and in the intensity and spectral composition of the light sources relative to the pigment on the interlocutor. The Decay crash happens in approximately 5% of images over time where the goal is to cause this crash. The odds of the crash are substantially lower when not attempting to cause this result and almost zero in the normal accepted use of the panorama feature. The crash introduces “pixels” into the frame at a lower resolution than the overall frame. These may be quantization blocks in the processing. For whatever the reason these blocks remain and often sit on top of flat color fields. There is a lower probability that parts of the “image” remain, meaning that the background has texture and structure in addition to the pattern of granular pixels. These pixels may be one color or the patterns may be formed by pixels of multiple colors. Sometimes they appear to include faces and creatures. **ABOUT CELADOOR** The exploration of hardware with the goal of bending it to another purpose is at the center of my life, both personally and as a core point of interest in my career. The tradition of generative photography is built on a similar repurposing of hardware and processes. Seeing a tool and imagining a how it can be used in a new way or or given a new purpose. Over the last ten years my personal work has coalesced around the iPhone and creating work that exploits the gaps between the assumptions made by the designers of the computational photography processing at the center iPhone’s camera and the actions of this one particular user.
Decay is a series entirely focused on crashing an iPhone to generate images that hint at the digital world that exists in the cameras that we all carry with us everywhere. Digital cameras are so common that we look at the outputs the same way we look at point and shoot cameras. **THE PROCESS** My body of work is made up of images produced using multiple generations of iPhones and effective manipulation of the panorama feature within the camera software. There are only 4 essential elements: a light source, the photo app, myself and an interlocutor - an arbitrary object that sits in the light path partially occluding the lens. The goal is to crash the processing software, rendering it unable to ‘read’ the image data in the way it was intended. Images are created by heavily controlling the path through which light gets to the camera lens by reflecting, refracting, or transmitting through the Interlocutor. Over the years I have used my fingers, money, credit card holograms, candy wrappers, the metallic closure of a sake bottle, water bottle wrappers, and whatever else has been at hand including the occasional bar napkin. The process is haphazard and, to some degree, parasitic. It makes full use of an unaltered consumer device with the goal of generating very specific crashes or glitches. **DECAY SERIES** Decay is my favorite output; to me, it is the most fun and a has the capacity to produce the most surprising results. Images that depart completely from anything recognizable as photography. As with most of my work, each shot is composed in a similar way: moving the iPhone and the Interlocutor relative to the available light. There are very similar repeated patterns of movement up and down and left and right with occasional contortions as the pattern of light sometimes reframes the window of available movement in the panorama app. The unique outputs are created by subtle changes in my movement and in the intensity and spectral composition of the light sources relative to the pigment on the interlocutor. The Decay crash happens in approximately 5% of images over time where the goal is to cause this crash. The odds of the crash are substantially lower when not attempting to cause this result and almost zero in the normal accepted use of the panorama feature. The crash introduces “pixels” into the frame at a lower resolution than the overall frame. These may be quantization blocks in the processing. For whatever the reason these blocks remain and often sit on top of flat color fields. There is a lower probability that parts of the “image” remain, meaning that the background has texture and structure in addition to the pattern of granular pixels. These pixels may be one color or the patterns may be formed by pixels of multiple colors. Sometimes they appear to include faces and creatures. **ABOUT CELADOOR** The exploration of hardware with the goal of bending it to another purpose is at the center of my life, both personally and as a core point of interest in my career. The tradition of generative photography is built on a similar repurposing of hardware and processes. Seeing a tool and imagining a how it can be used in a new way or or given a new purpose. Over the last ten years my personal work has coalesced around the iPhone and creating work that exploits the gaps between the assumptions made by the designers of the computational photography processing at the center iPhone’s camera and the actions of this one particular user.
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