CMD+SHIFT+4 (Grave Digging & Screen Grabbing)
The making of
Cumulative Loss involved the appropriation of countless images, images that were lying dormant somewhere until gravediggers began searching and digging. Pictures that through their lifecycle, devalued from the realms of documenting reality, disintegrated into pixels, and then resigned to some dusty crypt under the surface. Body snatching screen grabbers lay in wait until the lights went down to start excavating their valuable contents and capture whatever they could lay their hands on.
Did anyone see? How can we possibly trace ownership to decomposing material anyway? These thieving, grabbing hands ‘appropriated’ the stolen, sliced, disembodied loot. Examining, cutting, bruising, brushing, cloning, healing, dodging, sponging, transforming and erasing the accumulated digital detritus ensued.
A nebulous figure emerged, haunting the surface with translucent skin, wavering in and out of the virtual. I wonder where is the witness now to this familiar yet strange appearance? Summoned into being through digital printing onto handmade Japanese paper, it poses a rupture in our technological reality; a momentary break revealing fragments from elsewhere, actual places and events.
If Cumulative Loss is a ghostly image haunting our material world, then maybe it can make us feel something different, if only a disturbance in our habitual modes of spectatorship, in our daily consummation of countless images. Maybe the disturbance can invoke a different kind of participation with the digital image and its content, a different kind of witness.
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