About September 5th, 2008
Concept
This is an investigation of the transformation of the image in an interface that questions the role of algorithmic code in the construction of the visual and explores the process of dematerialization / rebuilding of identity, via image in social networks. See the application running.
We depart from a conceptual dialogue with the film Blow Up (Antonioni, 1966) to operate a rereading of the seminal essays by Vilém Flusser on photography in the form of aesthetic experience.
The project appropriates the structural parameters of digital image construction - pixel color coding – in order to dilute its secrets (interpreted here as its silvered silicon box, an update of the Flusserian black box), setting their programming routines in motion. This is achieved using the most popular resources of production and publication of pictures on the web, such as MMS and Flickr, and complex programming systems which transform the variables of the images in open environments for the enjoyment of its command lines.
Operation
Philosophy of the Silver Box accepts pictures sent via MMS and Internet through any device with connection capabilities (mobile phone, camera, computer) to a server that receives the files, sends them to the Flickr album of the project, processes the application “silverbox ” and, simultaneously, publishes the pictures – manipulated by our software – on the web and in a projection inside the exhibition space. DIY
Developed with Processing to run in Windows or Linux servers, this application transforms the image into an immersive interface, in the form of a three-dimensional object perpetually in motion. From the conversion of the color codification in numerical measures of height, the “silverbox” associates to each pixel a three-dimensional line, whose measure is proportional to the brightness of the color of the pixel.
Pictures can be sent to the projection in exhibition space locally, using personal equipment, or remotely over the Internet. The result is a set of unusual mobile matrices which are feedbacked by the Flickr dynamics.
This interaction, resulting from the symbiosis between mobile phones and the Internet, allows not only a planetary scale of participation in the exhibition space and the mixing of different kinds of audiences, but also creates a permanent archive of the various interventions of the public, which is available on the project site and can be continuously recycled by the actions of the interactors.
Of no less importance is the design of the system that adequates itself to the configuration of the equipment of the participants (for instance, renaming and resizing the received images), and the distribution of the open source software, available for download here.
Necessary Open Conclusion
By centralizing the action in the most common forms of production and publication of images on the web and transforming such access in an aesthetic surprise (agencied by a routine programming that could be implemented by the rules of the “silvered silicon box”, but that was not predicted) the project opens towards a reprogramming of the senses. At the same time it gets closer to a philosophy of the technical images that requires the “Other” as the destination of a route in constant process of bifurcation and node of a provisional infinite “Youniverse”
Giselle Beiguelman & José Carlos Silvestre
Philosophy of Silver Box is at BIACS 3 (Bienal de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla) and at arte.mov in São Paulo
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