ISEA2015: DISRUPTION

Museum of Vancouver, Vancouver, Canada

August 14 – August 19t, 2015

DISRUPTION is the theme of the 2015 International Symposium for Electronic Arts. It invites a conversation about the aesthetics of change, renewal, and game-changing paradigms. We look to raw bursts of energy, reconciliation, error, and the destructive and creative forces of the new. Disruption contains both blue sky and black smoke. When we speak of radical emergence we must also address things left behind. Disruption is both incremental and monumental.

Tobias Klein’s Slow Selfie II was exhibited at ISEA 2015: Disruption.

SLOW SELFIE II articulates an environmentally controlled, slow-growing self-portrait using the artist’s own body in the form of Magnetic Resonance Image data. Similar to analog photography, using a chemical conversion, reducing silver halides into silver metal, the essential chemical conversion in photography, the work utilizes the chemical process of experimental crystal condensation into the 3D printed data-set as the emergence of the second layer of crystalline skin and gestalt.

The process is environmentally reactive to temperature and minute fluctuation on the surface of the submerged 3D printed substrate. This emergence of a crystalline mask, amalgamated into the porous surface of the 3D printed skeletal medical dataset is accompanied by a continuous loop of 3D projection mapping and recording, questioning the ability of recognition and interpretation as well as stimulating and inhibiting the crystalline growth. Slow Selfie comments on the perpetual cyclical emergence of human vanity in feedback looped sedimentation of Aluminium Sulphate Crystals and projection mapping.

The work is articulated in the tradition of portraiture yet at the same time is in opposition and dialogue to the vanity and obsession today with the digital portrait, devaluated through the myriad of shared websites and diluted by the unconscious image culture of instant visual gratification.