ARS 281 Final Project Proposal

This project will be a sequence of photographs whose metadata are intentionally corrupted. Taking inspiration from the visual styles of James Welling’s “Glass House” series, and a similar process of Jehad Nga that involves introducing data to a photograph’s binary code, the artist will engage in manipulating color and structure in the photographic image. Overall the series will portray multiple arbitrary objects and scenes that will communicate a sense of interactions that the artist finds themselves in throughout their everyday experience. While unique to the artist, these scenarios should be able to be understood by viewers as a familiar scene. Over the course of the series, these images will have several other images superimposed on top of each other that suggest movement slowed down in time, a delay in the ability to comprehend the action, and a split sense of location. After these images are compiled together, the whole group will have their metadata corrupted to distort the viewer’s ability to understand the action clearly. The data editing will be performed using a hex editing software that will enable the artist to directly edit the binary data of the photograph’s file.

This project will portray a sense of a distress that is core to the artist’s experience of the world. Through the depictions of superimpositions and the effects of the corrupted files, a sense of delay in time will be represented that is grounded in the immediacy of the static imagery formed from the corrupted file. In this combination, a sense of distance to the reality of these commonplace subjects will be illustrated in the series. This distance which occurs from the artists own experiences of distress, exhaustion, and agitation.