![Data Traffic - Map 03 Data Traffic - Map 03](https://www.premioceleste.it/indi/_pics/0/0/2014-75590-310763_10097_4565_t.jpg?m=1415280828)
Data Traffic - Map 03
How do we perceive photographic images and texts in relation to the experience of the Internet? And how does the digital image and its distribution via the Internet change the nature of the photographic image itself?
Data Traffic presents a paradoxical surface where digital and analog, virtual and real are indistinguishable giving light to a ‘nomadic image’, i.e., a playful critic of representation. It is an image without subject (in a sense a fractal image) where reproductions appear and collapse in constant circular movement, a continuous renewal of the same tension between concealing and revealing. Even though photography is at the very core of the project, it escapes the standard way of perceiving and understanding this medium: photography is no longer an object, and representing objects, but rather a ‘never ending’ visual experience. The project does not deal so much with history as with the contemporary condition of ephemerality. Hence the title of the project: shapeless data drifts in the eternalised context of silent traffic.
Process
The experimentation starts with a selection of screenshots, found photographs and text fragments, which go through a post-production phase where technology is challenged by using it not to produce a conventional or mimetic image.
Photography is no more a mirror of the outside world, no more a ‘pencil of nature’ or a ‘transparent window’. This two-way relationship between the world and its representations is now broken.
A = A is over.
Photography is conceived as a continuous process of manipulation of an initial invisible, untouchable, unthinkable ‘latent image’. A sublime initial being of the image to which the project aims to arrive by collapsing representations and by bringing them back to the state of Data.
Data are not Information. They are not yet aesthetic object, they exists before and after language. They are ‘given’ to us as raw materials to start with.
This subversion of the linear relation A=A culminates in a final result that is not preconceived but rather the opposite: always new and unexpected.
A → B is over.
Because the process is not considered to be a linear trajectory from point A to point B, but an incessant repetition of the same compositional and de-compositional act, the images constructed result from a particular moment in the present, concluded and dynamic at the same time. The concentration of registered movements in the image reflects the condensed saturation of Internet images entering our field of vision.
The time in which Data Traffic is built and experienced is considered to be circular, in the way in which we scan information on the Internet. The resulting image captures all these qualities from the different sources and processes and displays them in form of a multidimensional freeze-image. It invites the viewer to come to a brief standstill and reflect on the ever faster evolving flow and transformations of the photographic image in a digital world.
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