Y SIN EMBARGO magazine

I always enjoy the “assignments” for Y SIN EMBARGO Magazine. They force me to conceptualize what I am doing. My interpretation of the latest assignment was that it was about “digtal materialism”, that is, the desire to possess digital artifacts.

I began by thinking about storage (in the technical sense, e.g. hard disks, DVDs, etc.) which are fundametally needed to be digitally materialistic. I started shooting DVDs and their reflections. Pretty soon, I realized that a DVD was a kind of mirror. I had some luck previously shooting reflections of my TV off my coffee table. The TV provides a still image (if you pause) with lots of vibrant colors.

This led to my first submission, entitled Absorption, which is a reflection of a commercial off of the DVD. I believe it was a commercial for some kind of tropical vacation getaway, and the sunbathing model had her head tossed back looking up at the sky. The model’s face fits almost perfectly in the DVD. The DVD has distorted her face into a kind of round shape, which makes her appear quite primitive. She appears to be gazing up, as if lost in thought. I call this “Absorption” because it symbolizes the capture of the digital artifact into storage, even though it is just a fleeting reflection. She is contained, at least mometarily, in the medium.

Next, I started wondering if I could build a large mirror out of several DVDs, and I did some experiments with small arrays of DVDs that didn’t turn out so well. However, the idea led me back to an idea I had last year about replicating center pivot irrigation in art. If you are not familiar with center pivot irrigation, it is a method of crop irrigation that utilizes a watering system that rotates around a center pivot in a field. You can often see them as patterns of circular shapes from an airplane in large farming areas. I find these pivot irrigation systems quite beautiful.

So, my second submission, entitled Maintenance, was an attempt to replicate the circular shapes of a typical center pivot irrigation system using DVDs. I replicated a small piece of this image. (Can you see where?) This was an extraordinarily tedious project. I almost gave up several times. There are approximately 144 separate subimages. Each subimage was constructed from shots of DVDs, circuit boards, schematic diagrams, floppy disks, and hard drive enclosures. Each of these cells required multiple layers to construct. In some cases I used seven or eight layers to get the textures and colors I wanted. This symbolizes to me the idea that you have to maintain all of this information — you have to back it up, index it, organize it, etc. And that our digital collections are much more than independent files, but rather there are connections amongst them, a kind of communication.

Por Bill Horne para YSE #23, to have or not to be?

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