Current Exhibitions

2 July - 2 August, 2008

pressing matters - contemporary printmaking

alexis beckett, jazmina cininas, clare humphries, julia silvester, gary james aka spook, ruth johnstone, damon kowarsky, andy tetzlaff, deb williams

20 June - 12 July

pleasure machines

chantal faust

at the vca Margaret lawrence gallery

What happens when the digital optical scanner is used for the photographic reproduction of three-dimensional objects? The flatbed scanner seems an inappropriate technology for such a task. But what results is a complex aesthetic phenomenon that prompts a profound consideration of the differences between an analogue, lens-based culture of photography and an emergent screen-based digital culture.

A relatively new technology, the flatbed scanner is generally not associated with the reproduction of tactile objects and it is not commonly used as a vehicle for artistic expression. This form of image making in relation to the history of photography and the current state of digital production is yet to be fully explored within contemporary art theory and criticism. This study aims to show that the scope of this enquiry includes a significant contemporary theoretical debate concerned with libido and the philosophy of desire, with its repertoire of new aesthetic concepts identified with “sensation” and “affect”.

Supplanting the role of the photographic camera, the scanner is employed in order to create a new hyper-real viewing space that simultaneously compresses, perverts and intensifies the subject. The image produced by the scanner is a pixellated discharge that belongs to the realm of the screen. All that is solid melts into the atomised interface and is subject to the limitations of its inbuilt intelligence. Colour, form, texture and weight are translated into concepts that are subsequently interpreted into two-dimensional representational structures. This denial of the physical that occurs during the transmutation is one of the key elements that make the flatbed a worthy vehicle for a Pleasure Machine. For we have now entered, what Merleau-Ponty regarded as “the screen with no horizons”… and this is the space of sheer fantasy.