Untitled - Scream #1

This work operates on the threshold where the photographic image loses its documentary clarity and becomes an autonomous visual event. The starting point is television footage of a random crowd. By isolating individual faces and magnifying them to an extreme degree, grids, pixels and artefacts emerge; the technical structure comes to the fore and supplants the illusion of photographic transparency.

As the image breaks down, its original meaning also dissolves. The isolated faces now seem to oscillate between ecstasy, fear, horror and vulnerability. The image unfolds a reality of its own, and the relationship between the image and the viewer begins to shift. Missing information is not supplemented, but added through the act of seeing. Meaning arises not solely from the visible, but in the very act of seeing itself.

The digital television image is thus not a neutral document, but material whose technical limitations become an aesthetic principle. Enlargement does not reveal details, but generates new images that were not originally visible. The individual emerges from the collective, whilst at the very same moment their identity vanishes back into the grid. Caught between visibility and resolution, the image is neither a document nor an abstraction, but both.

Scream thus explores not so much the event as the conditions of seeing. When does an image cease to represent reality, and when does it begin to create a reality of its own?