Analogue or digital: it’s the Thunderdome throw-down of our time. Two formats enter; one format leaves. Either or. Pick a side. Or do like Brooklyn-based artist Job Piston and use ’em both. Reds is a series of physical prints made on light-sensitive paper pressed up against a computer screen — and they’re pretty dang cool.
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In an interview with KCET Artbound, Piston explains that the experimental technique actually came about by accident — as many genius ideas do — when he exposed a pile of paper in the darkroom while checking his email one day.
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Piston refers to the finished work as “a fossil of the computer screen,” an interesting explanation that brings together another pair of often disparate forces: man and machine. “The image has been photographed, processed, scanned, uploaded, downloaded, pixelated and exposed before it has had time to come up for air. The result is a slippery residue of what’s left.”
While Piston is specifically focusing on identity and the soul-searching questions of selfie-culture with this collection of portraits, it seems like there’s incredible potential to try out loads of different themes with the process: a history of photo equipment, from camera obscuras Daguerrotypes to pinholes to Polaroids; or actual fossils, even. Too meta? Either way, man, I’m digging Piston’s whole project here. [KCET Artbound, UCR ARTSblock]