Week 54_Ronen Tanchum

ORATHOGRAPHICS

cargocollective.com/ronentanchum

"Throughout history, there has often been unease around adopting new technologies within the fine arts. These new technologies are merely new tools that come between the maker and the image, yet each one seems to profess its greater transparency and immediacy for viewers. We can think of oil paint as a tool that allowed for greater depth and realism, just like photography and then later film enabled different kinds of realism. Now digital imaging provides an entirely different type of realism, and just like analogue photography and film that came before, it promises an unprecedented degree of immediacy. Mainstream commercial media has always taken up these technologies most readily, often for the purposes of advertising or entertainment. As a result, these seemingly immediate technologies also come to be associated with commerce and industry, and are often dismissed by artists and aesthetes as mechanical and market-driven. But throughout this same history, we’ve seen artists strip away these associations, using the new technologies towards ends that subvert their sense of realism, immediacy and efficiency. This is what I propose to do with digital imaging. Through the use of creative coding and organic algorithms, I hope to work towards uncovering our assumptions around digital imaging and getting us to rethink our interactions with our increasingly digital world. 

(...) Today’s digital landscape is changing rapidly, and that means responses to the images will change too. With these works, I hope to not just capture a single moment within this digital landscape, but to also offer a means through which to explore the ways that this changing landscape continues to alter our perception."

—Ronen Tanchum