[-empyre-] archives & memorials

["Sophie Kahn" <sophie_kahn@hotmail.com>]

I've never posted on the list before, but felt compelled to respond to this 
thread with some thoughts on my own work, as they are -- I hope! -- so 
apposite to this discussion. (A small selection of images can be seen here: 
http://www.gertrude.org.au/studio_artists_template.php?id=47)

As yet another photographer-turned-new-media-artist, I have a long interest 
in the debates surrounding preservation, archives and memorials. I'm 
particularly interested in the well-intentioned complicity demonstrated by 
the nineteenth-century impetus to photographically preserve disappearing 
places and cultures... This was a central theme of a project I did last year 
entitled "Reconstruction", in which I digitally reconstructed Gertrude 
Street from images in the City of Yarra photographic archives (which are 
fascinating in that particular way that only found photographs can be). The 
output of this spatialized archiving was an animated 3d model, which had 
been stripped of all its surface data (textures, colour, human presence) and 
was reduced to ghostly architectural form. The work became almost an 
admission of the losses and failures involved in the archiving process; the 
map instead of the terrain.

My most recent work (which I've just exhibited at Graphite, here in 
Singapore) is also deeply concerned with the idea of the memorial as trace. 
Working with the technicians at SIAL at RMIT, I have been scanning my face 
and body with a 3d laser scanner, then outputting that data as a wax 
stereolithograph, then using the wax to make a bronze cast. What interests 
me, again, is the inadequacy of the technologies I use: the laser scanner is 
more commonly used for architectural or heritage applications, and was never 
designed to capture the moving body. When confronted with motion, the 
outputs can be very unpredictable... (In fact, the face-scanning process is 
not dissimilar to that of the nineteenth-century studio portrait: the head 
is immobilised, and the scan takes several minutes.) And again, the data 
that results is diminished, even damaged, and on the threshold of 
recognizability.

Unlike in Christian Capurro's work, for example, the image is not erased, 
but it is assualted! I've tried to assert the materiality of the digital 
image: instead of being archived, pristine and inviolate, the digital trace 
left by the body during scanning goes through process upon process. It is 
compressed, decompressed, pixellated and ultimately degraded. (Eerily, the 
final results looked not unlike that other memorial representation, the 
death mask...)

A few of the Graphite presentations keyed into these myriad topics as well. 
One presentation on augmented reality mentioned the idea that digital 
heritage and archiving of, eg, objects sacred to Maori people, would allow 
those objects to be repatriated (Elgin marbles, anyone?) And for those of 
you who aren't familiar with it, Peter Morse's work on reconstructing 
archival stereoscopic photographs of the Antarctic is also well worth a 
look: http://www.petermorse.com.au

cheers,
Sophie


Sophie Kahn
Studio 6, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces
200 Gertrude St
Fitzroy
VIC 3065
Australia
tel (03) 9419-8982/ 0421 495-147