User:Marlon/what

Not finished! Last update: 20:13, 18 September 2012!

Installation: Tsunami

What? This graduation project consists of 1134 postcards laid out in a grid on the floor. Twenty-six columns, forty-eight 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 postcard is a URL that refers to the source of the image.

Found via Google search, the majority of the pictures were taken during the tsunami that occurred in Japan on March 11, 2011. The rest of the images are technically unrelated: paintings of waves, stills from movies or pictures taken during a different tsunami in another country. There are only 30 distinctively different images, most are slightly altered copies. 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? The postcards refer not only to the site of the disaster, but also the place where they were found online. Placing them 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 the last year of art school, Reality by proxy is a thesis about (hyper)reality. It is printed on white tractor-feed paper, the tear edges still intact. This results in a very long strip of text. Most of the words are underlined and look similar to online hyperlinks, turning the thesis in to a sort of cybertext. There are images added to the text, but they’re 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 thirty grainy black and white images, used to emphatize the thesis’ subject. For example: Magritte’s painting of a train driving through a fireplace and a still from L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.

Why? How? Adding hyperlinks, and allowing the reading to choose his or her own path through the material, the medium becomes as important as the message itself. This is a reference to the subject of the thesis, etc. (.........)