domestication: being modified for traits
that are more desirable for humans
This project originates from photography based color and shape extraction, in which analog and digital photographs go through a loosely defined virtual process, to redistribute and relocate the contained colors in a different amount and intensity, as well as reducing and fixating the shape.
    So the specific scene as a “reliable” window or representation, that our perception is usually unable to see beyond – into the visually perceivable without story, wishful thinking, sense making, explanation and meaning – declines and emerges as something graphic, that looks like it‘s somehow foggy, dirty in a colorful way and still loading to get specific and clear, but also still shows some parts of the shape‘s main outlines or edges, that survived, like it’s oversaturated and overexposed.
    It‘s challenging to see it as something more than a – disappointingly not even autonomously moving, blinking and morphing – gradient without relation, like straight out of Illustrator in seconds, and less than the specific image, that’s instantly exhausted by human conditioning and supposedly tells everything in seconds. So it just won‘t clear up, load and unveil itself, to comprehend it in the most linear way possible, as well as it won’t start forcedly spinning and changing color, just to compensate the discomfort and incapacity to endure the lack of convenient serving.
    But it’s also not just a quick cheap virtual breeze of nothingness to just deplore the missing quality of actual content. Since I‘ve started with this process I‘m calling ‚extraction‘, which can be considered a manual process in steps of redistribution, relocation and change of intensity and amount, the algorithm behind every commanded action in processing visual data never disappears. It‘s still the visual representation of the logic we appreciate and glorify, that repeats itself like a collectively implanted prayer, that plays out like a program. It‘s just another way of reproducing the mantra „the survival of the fittest“ in a hollow, domesticated setting, while the training doesn‘t have a method, a medium or a tool.
    In the context of crypto art, the topic of conceptually asking crucial questions about the simple and perfidious optical satisfaction in art and the forced generalized actions that are now available in virtual processing, sets itself to a new level. The arrogance that‘s just satisfied in seeing „the survival of the fittest“, like an ideology one of a kind, obliterates all of the fine, subtle, sensitive and quiet connections, that build up the whole integrity. The remains are empty, loudly trying to convince us they’re not.
    Apart from the specific crypto art space, which manically offers to be a parody of the visual data output generated in digital media – completely unaware of itself – the obsession, resulting blindness and lack of contemplation in the field of digital media hides behind processing, coding and transforming data downright self-evidently into cooptation design, efficiently catching and locking up consciousness, elevating the term artificial intelligence into a less idealised, more literal dimension of understanding.
    While the irrelevance of how any source of data is being used for visual consumer satisfaction is yet to be found, creativity and the energy of creation itself is trapped on the retarded surface called effect, that continuously needs more effort to be kept alive, just to distract from the reality of a growing universal void and the incapability of perceiving, preserving, protecting, combining and creating connection of any kind. While the core of human intelligence disappears and is being replaced by counting down the 101 of control, until the center of activities does it autonomously, domestication is being amplified and displayed again as a pathetic solution.
    But still, written in the fascination and the drive of independent creation, in any generative ability with internalized repeatable actions, there’s still the hint of a naive, yet artifically confident desire to be unique and new. Like an amateur, but more innocent, helpless and constrained at the same time, it’s trying to live obtrusively as a shell, but human perception is still just consuming. Perception not being carefully used and treated as a medium, but mechanically discharged by sensory stimulation as something addicting that can be considered necessary, just repeats the logic. Until the substantial shift happens, integrity is nothing to be decrypted. In this sense, such creations – even though originating in vast, deafening quantities – have nowhere to come from, and nowhere to go.

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All the different versions originate from only one specific photographic image, so in that sense, they are related, but still presumptuously unique. The total set consists of 90 elements, containing two endpoints, where only the last remaining information is still present, while one step further there wouldn’t be anything left. These two endpoints are not part of this spectrum, consisting of 88 seperate particulars, displaying the wealth inside the alegedly infinite extent of the source material in the manners of an insensitive, detail-killing big bang, but instead are printed by hand via screenprint in a limited amount, since these endpoints only have a binary surface left - color yes, or no. (coming soon)


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Limitierter Kunstdruck

coming soon

Copyright © , Sebastian Diehl