Iconoclashes

Photography generated by customized digital software.
Collaboration with Clement Valla
Size 92 x 110 cm / edition 1+2AP
Size 40 x 50 cm / edition 5+2AP

It is well known to art historians and theologians, that many sacred icons that have been celebrated and worshipped in different religions, are claimed to not have been made by any human hand. Faces of Christ, portraits of the Virgin, Veronica’s veil; there are many instances of these icons that are supposed to have fallen from heaven without any intermediary. To show that a humble human (an artist) has made them would be to weaken their force, to sully their origin, to desecrate them. / Bruno Latour, 2002.

Iconoclashes are made using all the images from the Metropolitan Museum´s public web archive that are tagged with the keyword God or Religion. These images were fed into Adobe Photoshop using an automated script that randomly creates mashups of deities, talismans, stellas, gods, scribes and statues. At first they seem like typical museum objects, easy to parse and forget, but then you realize you have no idea what it is you’re really watching since it’s an algorithm and not a human that has created these images of virtual artifacts.

The result is quite disorienting, causing a moment of puzzlement making it hard to read the images. You have to pause and try to figure out where they belong – what time period, what culture, what religion. On a sensory or phenomenological level they’re ambiguous since Photoshop makes them look so real, but the space, the colors and the physics just don’t add up.

 

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