The Conversation

The skype project Has the sharing of images –sharing perceptions-affected individuality? Optical technologies permeate everyday life, and by bridging vast distances the have changed the nature of vision. The personal has become institutional, mediated by camera and computers, and we inhabit virtual bodies created by photography, the telephone the television. So our primary question might address how technology affects biology”. Ali Hossani ( Vision of the Gods and Enquiry into the Meaning of Photography). My work is concerned with the nature of transmitted digital media in an age of advanced technology it has become a normal part of everyday life to interact with the virtual world where the boundaries of reality and fantasy are blurred. Skype is a series of photographs that examines the nature of the virtual image that stands in for the biological. As system comprised of electrons that Roy Ascott described as “weightless and dimensionless in any exact sense”. Within this system takes place the merging of the natural and technological worlds and the mimicking of the body and the eye, offering the potential of the multiple body and optic-organ in to form of a computer and mobile hardware. The Skype project aims to quantify this re-composing of distorted. streamed images. The pixel presents itself in its own time frame and colour, repainting and reconstructing its subject. Thought the use of photography can also consider the architecture of the electronic medium, recorded as contours that traverse pixel grid, mapping the surface of the screen the substrate of the electronic world. The question of representation of the real and hyper-real presented by photography as “the mirror of reality “ is called into question with the onset of streamed and mobile phone imagery, abstracted and faint representations are accepted as truth once the referent or event has been named. 2009