BEUN
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2016
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According to German-born philosopher Guenther Anders, Auschwitz and Hiroshima inaugurated an era in which humanity is incapable of representing what it has set up or created. The impossibility of representing catastrophe and disaster is, paradoxically enough, not related to the absence of documentation. According to Anders, the ʻun- representableʼ is primarily defined as our inability to take measure of our humanly-created disasters. Today, evidence of disputes, war and natural disasters comes in the wake of the Internet, social media and the television. For politician, art critic and art historian Giulio Carlo Argan the instant availability and dissemination of billions of images of human suffering and death in the continuous glare of our television and computer screens, has resulted in a form of 'disaster fatigue'. What is the role of photography and video in the era of un-representable disaster? How, then, can we describe traumatic events or classified sites without veering into sensationalism or ʻdisaster consumptionʼ? How do we provide information without succumbing to over-hyped curiosity or ʻconflict pornʼ? It is in light of these questions that Beun takes on its meaning. The immersive video piece Beun begins with an Associated Press photograph of a concentration camp in Ohrdruf in former East-Germany. The original archive photograph was translated into technical architectural drawings. A life-size model was built in my studio following the same spatial arrangements and dimensions of the original archive image. Two set builders, one set dresser and one lighting specialist worked together with me to re-create the original archive photograph as an exact architectural replica. The architectural set was placed on a 180degree revolving stage platform in in studio, which involved a rotation around the model's own axis. Collaborating with a software engineer, I applied different digital software algorithms and data-bending techniques to the video file, which resulted in unexpected errors transforming or erasing information of the video imagery. These errors or forms of glitches manifested as misinterpretations of the prompts of the applied digital softwares, generating 'nonsensical' imagery, and other inconsistencies. The video became digitally corrupted, ruptured, deformed and disfigured and can be described as existing in a perpetual state of instability and in-betweenness, continually metamorphosing into another form. Some argue that these glitches and unexpected 'behaviors' are insightful, revealing limitations or biases within the AI's design or other training data. The digital information of the video was additionally translated into audio information which undwent the same process of applied software algorithms and provides the soundtrack of the video piece. For French philosopher Henri Bergson, the image is a process in which memory is invested with the experiential force of present perception. Like Bergson, Beun suggests that both the hybrid technological form and the historical content need to be rethought and reinterpreted in our current post-lens-based digital world. Beun opens up a conversation about the contemporary socio-digital conditions of our current visual culture in relation to environments of conflict and dispute. The video piece challenges the directness of traditional photographic reportage as a methodology to represent traumatic environments and events, instead engages with the shifting meanings of the word 'document', forging new visual paths through the documentary field that has been transformed over the last decade by radical technological advances. In our new age of AI, thinking machines, algorithmic processing, and predictive policing, dramatic changes have happened to our visual field. Beun offers us an opportunity to think about our contemporary lens- based media as a ghostly medium: a medium resonating as a simulation or simulacrum of the ʻthingʼ it once was. AI-powered video generation tools produce images that carry the appearance of 'original' and 'true' photographs and yet they exist without the physical apparatus of the medium. Our current visual media continuously shapes visual forms out of data and the cultural relevance of photography, film and video has shifted from the representation of the object to the digital processes that reproduce the object. Invisible simulation, the work of computer software and agencies of algorithms are the agents for the mediumʼs dissolution as we used to understand it and yet these mechanisms ensure the mediumʼs continuation.