Artists statement / 2016

The photographic image is suffering from an identity crisis. It has been thrust into digital uncertainty and as a result, tends towards abstraction. My work illustrates the paradigm shift surrounding contemporary image making. The analogue-to-digital transition of photography and its supposed loss of ‘presence’. By encoding images into audio and back again, I interrogate the aesthetics of sensation; something often attributed to the ritual involved in setting up and playing a vinyl record.

In the writings of British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s, he details the perceived absurdity of dualist systems, a cognitive dissonance that mirrors the way images are made and forgotten. Ryles refers to this as ‘the ghost in the machine’. The images are my ghosts and the records are my machines.

Inspired by the Voyager satellite mission, soviet bone records and ham radio communications. This project exploits the SSTV protocol of encoding image information into an audio frequency. Effectively embedding visual information onto an audio format.