Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathDocument and Abstraction
 
 
 
 
 

icon: previous page

exposure time (as in early photography) and highest resolutions, an individual image is produced whose detail information is superior to the analog photograph, which again brings up old issues of documentary principles. But what is decisive is that a stringent motif with regard to content is an obstacle to arbitrary occupiability. On the other hand, of course a photograph of this detail and this formal organization says something about the abstract, the reduced, but the indexicality is preserved. What interests me about these structures is precisely the border between abstraction and concrete, realistic representation, the optical illusion between high-resolution, documentary photography and painterly aesthetics. Thus changing the viewing distance results in different possibilities of reading a paradoxical link: between a reflection on reproduction equipment and a necessary original perception of the work.

2.3. «When I am photographed, I feel like a hostage; I immediately pretend to be dead.»

[8]

The third group of works I would like to address is «Exposures» (2002/2003), a work that on the one hand

 

has very much to do with the executive medium itself. «Exposure» is a central photographic and cinematic term. On the other hand it concerns components of a media society that are sometimes voluntarily, often also involuntarily, at the mercy of media apparatuses. The machines which besides the actual recording apparatus are of great importance here are those of media light, which at certain moments constitute the basic requirement for being able to produce a media image. The lamps and flashes place us in a position in which we are unquestionably at the mercy of the person operating them, therefore ‹exposed.›

The wall separating public and private has become permeable. What also belongs to the active part of media existence is that we operate in a society in which media selfconfidence is becoming normal. Wherever a television camera or a microphone turns up today, people crowd around them. The ‹public grin,› the affected theatrical behavior, the ‹posing,› as Craig Owens calls it, the staging have become a collective method of conferring identity. In order to gain entry into the media machinery one must accept its rules of the game, which is demonstrated by the actor-like,

icon: next page