chinese whispers

A series of photographs I have taken for a brief entitled "Static". The notion of 'noise' and interference with digital imagery has been explored through macro imagery, taken from my computer screen. Apart from cropping some of the images, none of the photographs have been digitally edited; the idea is to capture naturally occurring interference; such as the static, dust and fingerprints on the computer screen.

The images have been created by re-photographing previous images again and again; the method has caused the original photographs to become unrecognisable. Through no action, other than simply repeating this process, have the images been "interfered" with, be it through digital enhancement or otherwise, as I wanted to show how digital screens (including that of a camera) can cause these manipulations themselves.

This idea has come about through my research for my dissertation; in which I am exploring how traditional print / magazine design might be losing out to the increase in popularity and demand for digital versions of the same thing (for example, ebooks and webzines). Part of this research was into how image resolution, screen quality, lighting and electronic interference can affect the quality or output of the digital piece.

I'm quite pleased with the results so far. I will explore my idea further by incorporating scans of text also, to bring in another element to the piece. By doing this not only do I want to juxtapose text with image; but show how the internet can lose its grip on what is real in terms of reliability. In this day and age it is very difficult to discover webtexts that are accurate and not based solely on opinion. The internet is an amazing and vast source of information; but how much of it can we actually trust as being reliable? Any one with an internet connection can post, edit, copy - and 'interfere' - with texts from all over the world. This process can be repeated over and over, causing what is being presented to lose all originality - much like a game of chinese whispers.

From Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia: "anyone with Web access can edit Wikipedia, and this openness encourages inclusion of a tremendous amount of content. About 75,000 editors—from expert scholars to casual readers—regularly edit Wikipedia" - A somewhat scary thought! I'm looking forward to exploring this further.


N.B: This project has made me realise that I totally need to clean my laptop screen more.