Introduction

My works in the new millennium are primarily a mixture of photography, computer based effects and video. The photo based works (as well as related installations and book art works) often use photographs that I have taken over the last 15 years, especially pictures taken during the 1990s when I worked as a photojournalist covering political topics in Eastern Europe, such as the Balkan conflicts, minority rights issues, and a documentary project on Istanbul from 1999.

A number of works from 2001 to the present have used these images as a starting point. They have then been digitally altered and then printed on paper and canvas. Often the resulting works appear, at first glance, to be paintings, drawings, traditional prints (such as lithographs or silk-screen) or collages. At closer inspection the viewer slowly becomes aware of their digital origins. One series, the Source Code Images, make this point more obvious by including software source code text as part of the images. Often my works have two dates - the date the photograph was taken and the date the image was transformed.

Image and Media

The reasons for these transformations are manifold; I try to make each artwork approachable from several starting points. One is an interest in the development of photographic aesthetics. As a rather young medium, photography has developed a series of aesthetic traditions; this is especially true of documentary photography, whose history can be tracked from the mid 19th century to the present. Early photography based its compositional and formal structures on that of 19th century painting, history painting and portraiture. The social themes depicted by mid 19th century realist painters have also played an important part in the development of documentary photography. One may also note that as photography took on the role of documenting the world, painting was 'freed from depicting the outside world' and allowed to explore more formal and abstract questions.

The relation between photography and painting (as well as drawing) is complex, with mutual influences. Especially in the last half century, painting has borrowed more and more from photography. From Picabia's use of mass media sources in the 1940s to the present, painters have used photographs as primary image sources. My work not only refers to photography's debt to painting and drawing, and contemporary painting and drawing's use of photography, but also seeks to subtly subvert the traditional power structures between different media. As the art market has created 'fashion cycles' of photo-based painting, drawing and collage, in which each media is highlighted for 'a season,' my works function, as counterfeits, critiquing this phenomena. The Light Drawings series, its title a pun on the word photography, appear at first glance to be large scale drawings. They are in fact photographs (of 1990s Bosnia, architectural details in Riga, street scenes in Istanbul) that have been digitally altered (through algorithmic filters) so that forms appear in dark, monochromatic outline. Often, with an editor's touch, I have erased and simplified information - a subtractive process that is quite the opposite of drawing's additive nature.

I don't intend my works to be 'perfect counterfeits' but to function as medial trompe-l'oeils. The viewer quickly discovers the slight of hand (or machine). But half the pleasure of a successful trompe-l'oeil is the viewers desire to give in to the artist's deception - the wilful suspension of disbelief.

Most importantly the effect also allows the viewer time to grasp the image 'in itself.' Too often photography is seen as a direct representation of reality - as a mere mirror of the world. Painting and drawing, meanwhile, are considered 'interpretative' media. By placing images between multiple media, my goal is to question and subvert the viewers' medial assumptions; to cause a debate on the relation between representation and interpretation.

i.Introduction



iii.The Text Behind the Technical Revolution

iv.Toward a Post-cinematic Language

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The Text behind the Technical Revolution

In 1984 the Apple Macintosh was the first general release personal computer to have a Graphic User Interface (GUI), based on technology developed in the 1970s at Xerox PARC. Before then computers were number and text based; in fact behind the GUI of our computers, laptops and mobile phones there exists a basis of text in the form of software source codes and scripts.

Since 1984 our world has been radically changed by a digital revolution made accessible by the GUI. We carry around a digital camera (often as part of our mobile phone) which we use to document our ever changing world. We can instantly send the images to friends or colleagues, or we can download them onto our laptops, where we have a variety of software options that function as virtual darkrooms and graphic design labs. We can then email these images further or publish them online in blogs or social networking sites (or in the case of video on youtube). Thirty years ago photography was still a time consuming process. Altering photographic images was the provenance of experts. Publishing and dissemination were specialised fields, often expensive and beyond the means of the average person. While most people in the developed world use mobile phones, email, and surf the internet as a primary source of information and exchange, the vast majority of contemporary art ignores this technological revolution, in spite of the fact that the technology involved has been mainly visual in its interface, and indeed has changed the way we visualise, record and even remember our lives.

As mentioned above the GUI is just a surface, an interface allowing us to easily navigate our computers (or phones) and the internet. Beneath this surface lies the software that runs it all. And this software is based on codes and scripts written in computer languages. This is the arcane, even hermetic level, without which we would still live in the late industrial age of the 1960s. It is a world open to the few - web designers, programmers, hackers - who create (and sometimes create havoc in) this brave new world.

The first works in which I used source code (simple HTML code from a scholarly website) was the Metacontent series (2001-4). I altered seven black and white photographs that I had taken of the Macedonian capital Skopje, first inverting them to appear as negatives, then adding a green tint. The effect resembles that of military night vision images - an effect that connotes paranoia. These images are then overlaid with HTML text from a web page discussing the use of the internet by Macedonian nationalists. The page comes from a website by the Czech new media scholar Denisa Kera, examining the use of the internet by Balkan nationalists. What I found so special about her writing on Macedonia was her observation that Macedonian nationalists spent much less time on advancing their own national myths, than on discussing the national myths of neighbouring countries, which they saw as a threat. This 'mythophobia,' as she called it, was the inverse of traditional nationalism. This inverse being a parallel to my altered, inverted images.

The HTML text contains both the content (i.e. text) of the page and the coding (which expresses font, spacing and other details of the web page). Spread over seven works, the digital content and form are fragmented, and the viewer sifts through the information (both in the photographs and the text) like an archaeologist. In 2006 the works (in the form of seven prints) were presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje. Viewers studiously dissected the works, which depicted alternate views of their city and nation. The Metacontent series also exists as a digital projection, where all the information appears over a sequence of time.

The Europa series (2002-4) was formulated as a response to the process of EU enlargement. Twelve images, photographs that I had taken in 11 Eastern European countries plus Turkey, are transformed in hue and colour, and collaged with HTML text and Java script from the government websites of the respective lands. Additionally the national emblem of the country is included. The initial title of the project was werben -> bewerben -> europa (apply -> advertise -> for europe) which refers to the EU enlargement process. Each country's national website not only functions as an advertisement, but by showing excerpts from the source code, the works expose how savvy (or amateurish) the web design in each case is. Viewers use visual and textual clues - the image, text excerpts, the emblem - to inform themselves about these new or prospective EU members.

Europa also exists both as a series of digital prints and together as a digital projection, each image dissolving into a pattern of pixels before being replaced by the next.

Recent works have played on the level of medial trompe-l'oeil by transforming photographic images via computer software. Pixels are altered to create a texture of brushstrokes. The works are then printed on canvas. These newer works include source code fragments from computer viruses. These fragments often take part in indirect interactions with the images - puns, metaphors, poetic devices abound. The source code of computer viruses often contain non code language, either hidden messages or tags left by hackers, or mnemonic devices where the hacker writes a favourite word or phrase instead of a variable such as xy. This hidden poetics of the cyber world is then appropriated and combined with images of the real world, such as in untitled (love virus), 2007, where fragments of the notorious 'I love you' virus are combined with an image of the destroyed Olympic village in Sarajevo.

The Weather series meanwhile combines images of cloud formations, again photographs that appear at first glance to be paintings, with algorithms downloaded from the internet. These algorithms have been developed by mathematicians and computer programmers working on a software for weather forecasting.

Toward a Post-cinematic Language

A third group of works are Cuts, a series of photographic details edited, sorted and collected from larger images over the last few years. These details are usually discovered while preparing the original images for other uses. The process is reminiscent of Antonioni's film Blow Up, where a photographer discovers a murder in the background detail of a photograph he had innocently taken in a city park. The images in Cuts are taken out of their original context, often recombined with other images, and seem to divulge new stories, separate from their original context.

They also hint at a cinematic context, often appearing more like film stills than photographs. Their selection, re-combination and display mirror the process of film montage and editing.

Recent video works have also sought to explore the borders of visual and textual language in the digital age. Several works have used screenplays derived from internet blogs. The video Cordoba was filmed in the Mesquita of Cordoba, a cathedral which was originally a 9th century mosque. Filmed at an irregular speed setting, the static architecture, a series of marble arches, contrasts to the figures of tourists who appear as ephemeral wraith-like blurs. A women's voice, speaking English with an Iranian accent, recites a text collage based on excerpts of blogs written by migrants from the Near East. The themes are homesickness, melancholy, estrangement and the experiences of Muslim immigrants in the west.

A related work, El-Andalus clips, is made up of five short clips, all under two minutes. The clips exist as stand alone works, or together. Three include recitations of a text collage similar to that of Cordoba. The narrator stumbles across the English text. Combinations of takes and breakdowns are used as an editing device for the visual images, collected excerpts of footage from southern Spain - the ruins of a Moorish fort, the view across the straits of Gibraltar, architectural details from Alhambra - which refer to Europe's old cultural connection to the Near East. Image and text, unrelated in origin, combine and influence each other's form to elicit new meanings and relations.

A third video, Bulbul, combines references to painting, sculpture, early photography and new technology. Filmed in digital video at low light, using solely moonlight, the image shows a model in the artist's studio as well as the night sky. The model poses are based on Titian's Venus of Urbino, and Michelangelo's Night. The inspiration for filming by moonlight derives, in part, from Alfred Stieglitz's famous night photographs from the early 1900s. The soundtrack is the song of a nightingale, recorded in an urban park on a mobile phone.

-Christian de Lutz, June 2008