Abstract
You. Here. Now. is an interactive installation designed for gallery exhibition that explores ideas of temporal and locative contexts for ephemeral digital portraits. it is part of an ongoing project examining ways to integrate contextual data in digital art works.
At the beginning of each day, the work trawls the websites of selected news organisations and downloads al the visual imagery it comes across. These images are then sampled to provide a large number of fragments, each of which reflects the preoccupations and priorities of the news gathering organisations, but which are (because of their size) prevented from functioning iconically; each is a fragment, which will usually suggest a larger context, but which will almost never present its references fully formed. The fragments are each stored, together with their average colour value.
As the piece is examined, a portrait of the viewer gradually emerges from the background presentation of several hundred fragments (which are in a continuous state of flux). Through the currency of its materials and specificity of its location, it is a portrait which is necessarily a product of a specific time. It carries within its basic materials references to wider narratives of power and place from which both the work and the portrait have emerged.
At the beginning of each day, the work trawls the websites of selected news organisations and downloads al the visual imagery it comes across. These images are then sampled to provide a large number of fragments, each of which reflects the preoccupations and priorities of the news gathering organisations, but which are (because of their size) prevented from functioning iconically; each is a fragment, which will usually suggest a larger context, but which will almost never present its references fully formed. The fragments are each stored, together with their average colour value.
As the piece is examined, a portrait of the viewer gradually emerges from the background presentation of several hundred fragments (which are in a continuous state of flux). Through the currency of its materials and specificity of its location, it is a portrait which is necessarily a product of a specific time. It carries within its basic materials references to wider narratives of power and place from which both the work and the portrait have emerged.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - 11 Jul 2013 |
| Event | Illusions - Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Duration: 11 Jul 2013 → 21 Sept 2013 |