Research and production centres around strange attractor chaos theory, parapsychology, and image manipulation programs. The art work demonstrates a process of repetitive shearing. Shearing reduces the photographic image into a series of pixilated bands. The newly constituted image bands carry traces of the original photograph information in to the next shear function until they are stretched and distorted into a newly related form. The original and trance state mixture of the newly constituted photograph are further reflected in the choice of the artist's subject matter: a parapsychological medium, pausing before passing into a teleplasmic episode. The process of shearing an image and arriving at a new translation beckons ideas of slight of hand, and communication from the other side.
A photo installation exhibited in 1999 ( and again in 2003) features four, vaious large sized, Black and White photographic panels. Each panel represents four captured shears taken from a single photographic reference of a trance medium on the verge of a teleplasmic utterance.
The overlapping of images in the installation.... become a physical demonstration of files overlapped on the virtual desktop. As a loose grouping against the wall, it is only the top image that can be seen in its entirety. The other three images can be glimpsed from the side.
The work takes its theoretic cues from Chaos theory - in particular the strange attractor branch - and parapsychology. Simple deterministic systems generate random behavior when looped observed Henri Poincare, and as in this work when the image is sheared in a feedback loop subsequent times. As a result of this action put upon it, the whole original image is reconstituted, if only in little peeps and blurts. A similation of the origianal picture comes together slowly, as each shear progresses appearing as if an apparition, not wholly complete, but with definate strains of the original recognizable. Here, one is reminded of Cronenburg's "the Fly." Human genetic code smearing into a fly's parallels computer determined action that takes pixels and feeds them in to themselves allowing some of the reconstituted image to be lost while permitting remaining pixels- as computer determined threads and detritus - to work towards the reconstitution of each subsequent shear.
From a scientific perspective the work demonstrates a Poincare recurrence. Complex files of information tend not to reorganize to a redeemable state a second time but return to the point of almost recurring and are somewhat eroded and spotty.
In the realm of action, the computer participates, or so it seems, in a continuous vibration of influence as the image from one level informs the path the shear on the next level undertakes. It is a dance between indiscriminate pattern and randomness as the computer parameters choose particular bits of pixel information to use in the reconstitution (see Katherine Hayle's text Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, Cornell University Press 1990). To magnify this as well the constant cycling of the strobing light from the computer monitor, along with the after image persistence of vision in our eyes do the newly, shimmed images come to light.
On the panels the images are simultaneously frozen (captured by Photoshop) and hot (as they are animated by the viewer's sight).
The cycling of the sheared images, disintegrate and are reinvented. The cycling of the images as they lean against the wall is a reflexive parallel. These images (leaning in 3D against the wall) are like files on the desktop waiting to be shuffled through, referenced etc. as I work on them on the computer; they are cycled and referenced and shuffled in my eye and in the whole shearing kaboodle itself (recycling moving, active etc.) takes place.
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Copyright Jen Hamilton 2007.
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