EXHIBITION: arch_0001_089_output / 2008
ARTIST: Sandro Djukic (HR)
VENUE: Galerija Galzenica, Velika Gorica/Zagreb;
http://www.galerijegalzenica.info/english.html
DATE: December 3 - December 24, 2008
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Sandro Djukic was born 1964. in Zagreb. He graduated at the Academy of
Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1989. In period from 1989 to1993 he attended Art
Academy in Dusseldorf (class of prof. Nam June Paik and prof. Nan
Hoover). At the same academy he attended postgraduate studies (class of
prof. Nan Hoover) in period from 1993. to 1994. Exhibited in Slovenia,
Germany, USA, Italy, Serbia, Austria and Croatia and lectured at the
numerous conferences dedicated to media art (Rijeka, Zagreb, Plasy). In
1991. he received Croatian Artist Association Award.
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Taxonomy of technological transformation
The exhibition of Sandro Djukic is demanding. It’s demanding for the
author, but even more demanding for the audience. Not as much by its
form – although certain level of technological and visual literacy is
required – as by its content, more precisely by the issues it inquires
and their heaviness. One of these issues is the nature of photography as
a form of art in this, more and more, digitalized world. Although
digitalization of photography began (in its rudimentary form) more than
half a century ago, recent development of technology, with particular
relation to lowering costs of personal computers, storage media and
digital cameras, results in two important things.
Photography does not go through chemical processing anymore, which
change its values. Not necessary in positive or negative way, but in its
essence. Increasing megapixels are not necessarily technologically
improving the quality of photography, but adversely excluding numerous
possibilities the classic, analog photography has to offer: from the
moment of taking a photograph to developing and processing it. Of
course, speed is obtained, as well as authenticity to some degree, but
the question which remains unanswered (and often unquestioned) is what
is lost. Question raised in mid-nineties by Critical Art Ansamble i
Geert Lovink refering to information technology and digital
communication is emerging in its new variant. The speed of information
transfer, as well as its quantity and accessibility, is rapidly
increasing, but time needed for processing remains the same – limited by
human cognitive ability. Does the limitation go toward superficiality
and prefering quantity over quality? In photographic discourse this
question may be: Does increasing quantity of digital photographies leads
to less time to observe, analize and process it visually and/or
intelectually?
Sandro Djukic is going even further. In a way he is reversing the
question that Benjamin asked in the 1930s (how has photography changed
art?) to make it: how has technologicaly mediated art (applied as in
graphic design, but also the art market) changed photography? More and
more common artistic practices transformed what was essentially an art
born in print into a salon art of single pictures on walls, often
incorporated in some multimedia instalation in which digitaly taken
photograph is digitaly presented or screened – never getting a chance to
be present in its intrinsic medium.
What is in that process changed in visual economy? The very notion of
visual economy is developed from the work of Deborah Poole, and places
emphasis on the organization of the production and exchange of images,
rather than relying simply on an analysis of their visual content: The
word economy suggests that the field of vision is organised in some
systematic way. It is also clear that this organisation has as much to
do with social relationships, inequality, and power as with shared
meanings and community ... For Poole, a visual economy has three levels:
the organization of production, encompassing both the individuals and
the technologies that produce images; the circulation of ... images and
image-objects; and the cultural and discursive systems through which
graphic images are appraised, interpreted, and assigned historical,
scientific, and aesthetic worth
By removing the images from their original contexts of production and
circulation, and placing them into a gallery, the visual economy that
produced these images is negated or obscured in favour of a more neutral
sense of the photograph as raw material or a window onto history. Whit
such an action single photographs, but also their whole (in the form of
photography data-base) becomes repositioned in relation to the
time/place of their origin, and at the same time in relation to the
time/place of their initialy intented purpose. That is leading us to
(maybe) the crucial problem of digitaly mediated photography: the
question of classification, of taxonomy. That is the question more and
more essential in many branches of information and library sciences
(especially in the theories of so-called semantic web), but also
unavoidable one for consumers of visual images, ranging from pornophiles
probing the Net in search for a distinct fetish, marketing experts
deciding on media campaign’s visual images, or common people trying to
handle ever bigger family albums. How to find what one is looking for in
the seemingly endless piles of photos (not to mention that very often
they are incredibly alike each other)?
Analogy with another problem of classification of visual material is
almost inevitable. Every human fingerprints is unique (although the
final scientific verdict is still awaited), but the clasification of
them is a problem yet unresolved. In case of photohgraphy confirmation
is much easier. According to the laws of physics two objects can not
occupy the same space in the same time, therefore, no matter how short
exposition is, even bursted shooting always will result with a set of
very similar (to the point of concealment), but not the same
photographs. System of clasification, however, can not benefit from such
evidence, as analogy with the history of dactiloscopy unmistakably shows.
An important first issue is that any one image has varied content, which
may be available either consecutively or concurrently to the same or to
different viewers. These multiple ways of seeing have been discussed
over the years, but it’s still a very open field. It is worth noting
here the contrast with textual data. While textual data can have a
multiplicity of content and meaning, in terms of the discrete elements
of a query, the visual and linguistic content are homologous. The
fundamental building blocks of text databases are ASCII character
strings representing words that have a direct semantic interpretation.
In contrast, the pixel values making up digital images have no inherent
significance. Considerable processing of the image is necessary even to
infer the presence of a simple shape like a circle, let alone a complex
object such as a tree. Direct comparison of image bitmaps can tell us
only one thing about a given pair of images – whether they are identical
or not. Nothing can be deduced about their similarity in terms of the
objects they contain, or scenes they represent.
Art history and its pertaining theories are rich in narratological,
ichonographic, multidiscursive and other attempts of clasification of
visual material, ranging from already classics like Panofsky to
contemporary, technologicaly highly sofisticated theories of Ornager and
Rasmussen (among others), however there is still no universaly
applicable method of catalogizing photographies, other then on a very
basic, bumpy level. Neither contemporary catalogization of image types
nor more traditional iconography just aren’t a match to the problem.
Maybe the premier value of Sandro Djukic’s exhibition lay in the fact
that, thorough playing with his own archive, thorough permutations and
variations of its parts, excessing from one media to another, from one
technique and technology to another clearly pointing to the problem
itself. (Igor Markovic)
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Pučko otvoreno učilište Velika Gorica
GALERIJA GALŽENICA
Trg Stjepana Radića 5
HR - 10410 Velika Gorica
tel:+385 1 6221 122 / fax: 6226 740
www.galerijagalzenica.info
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