alphaworks
Digital C print, Edition of 5 + 2: 70,56 x 70,56 cm, Dibond backing and back brace.
rushing signs in alphaworlds
alphaworlds are huge virtual worlds on the web, consisting of millions upon millions of objects created by hundreds of thousands of users. in order to get at the individual image objects, a twelve story pyramid was constructed as an alphaworld binder. when I first came across this world, borges' "the library of babel" immediately sprang to mind.
the upper level of this pyramid consists in the satellite picture of an entire alphaworld, going downward the scale gets smaller and smaller. The first level, the base of the pyramid, is the most detailed and contains thousands and thousands of close-up pictures.
I treat each of these twelve levels as a graphic data set, in order to decode and recode it by means of mathematical calculations, a kind of computing based on algorithms. If carried on indefinitely, this computing would lead to the dissolution of the graphic data, so to speak, to its dissolution through sameness in emptiness, as in the project of that name, which I carried out in the vienna kunsthalle in september 2000.
Codes are procedures of deception. Take, for example, video compressing. On the one hand, one increasingly dissolves the picture by decreasing the image rate; then in a further procedure, one increases the empty spaces between the running images. One could say that the "nothingness" becomes more and more expanded. This deception procedure functions as long as our senses are able to refill these empty spaces, through procedures of mathematical construction.
This kind of deceptive procedure is also applied, in a different way, to the coding of static images.
Even if the observer doesn't see it, the computer is analysing information. In fine gradations or displacements, additional messages are interwoven with the actual graphical information, using so-called steganographic techniques. Steganographic tools hide one message in the background noise of another.
I make use of these steganographic techniques to hide texts in the graphic data sets. These texts in turn influence the coding process, and thus have a direct effect on the resulting picture. So each picture contains a text that can only be revealed by means of a decoding procedure. The key to text number 186713 could, for example, be the two prime numbers 589 and 317. Breaking into the system is only possible with the code. Whoever knows the code is the master of life.
Just the thought that these alphaworks, 70,56 x 70,56 cm c-prints laminated onto aluminium, are not just pictures but are also conceived to carry data, e.g. Literary texts, allows one to speculate that it may possibly not be the materiality but rather the energy states, i.e. Thoughts, that determine the library of life.
What primarily intersts me in the computer-generated images of alphaworks, besides the prodecure of inserting texts unnoticed and thereby making dead patterns come alive, as it were- creating a "tapestry of life", poetically speaking-, is the procedural methodology of approaching the intersection of decoding and recoding, i.e. The search for the paradox of the image.
Since the dissolution and generation of image data merge into one another, defining the area of the intersection of decoding and recoding is a challenge that i am usually only equal to in the stance of passively negating a given formal entity.
© 2012 Toni Kleinlercher
