User:Marlon/what

Last update: 16:36, 25 September 2012

Installation: Tsunami

What? This graduation project consists of 1134 postcards laid out in a grid on the floor. There are 26 columns and 48 rows, forming a large square. Near the bottom some postcards are missing, as if it’s a work in progress. On each postcard a picture is printed, some postcards show just one, some have the same image repeated several times. And in the case of a larger image, multiple postcards are used to create a whole. On the back of each card is a URL.

The images depict the tsunami that occurred in Japan on March 11, 2011. Only 30 distinctively different pictures were used, a few of those not even technically related to the subject. Famous woodcut prints of off-shore waves, stills from movies and pictures taken during a different tsunami in a different country were also included.

Laid out chronologically from the top left corner, the postcards show water and waves, fire and explosions and finally, the debris and destruction that was left after a natural disaster.

Why? How? A fascination with virality in relation to the World Wide Web, led to an extensive Google search of images and copies of images. The subject: an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. They were printed on postcards to refer not only to the actual site of the disaster, but – by adding the URL on the back of the card – to the source of the image as well.

Placing these cards on the floor in a chronological order symbolizes the viral spread of online pictures, while at the same time a pattern is created that shows the course of a natural disaster.

Thesis: Reality by proxy

What? Written in my last year of art school, Reality by proxy is a thesis about (hyper)reality: real versus fake, nature versus culture, perception and media filters.

It’s printed on white tractor-feed paper, the tear edges are still intact. This results in a very long scroll of paper. Most of the words are underlined and look similar to online hyperlinks, turning the thesis into a physical hypertext. Some images are interspersed throughout the text, but they are so distorted they look like computer errors.

When folded the thesis resembles a booklet. Besides a small piece of paper with the title, the cover consists of two A3-size pages folded in half, again with the typical perforations of continuous stationery. Printed on one side of each page are a total of 30 grainy black and white images, used to emphasize the thesis’ subject.

Why? How? As it became such an important part of the thesis, a form had to be created that really underscores the importance of ‘media’ in relation to ‘reality’.

Text and images were printed using a 15 year-old dot matrix printer. The end result depended for the most part on how the printer would handle the source material. It read some images as commands and rendered others completely unrecognizable, like a computer glitch on print.

The hyperlinks added to the text allow the reader to choose his or her own path through the material. As a result, the medium becomes as important as the message itself.