Project Description:
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Excerpt from: Martin Summers, Dossier for Tenure and Promotion, pg 37
“Of all our senses, we use vision as the primary way to design, experience, or understand a designed object. Gestalt relationships rely on the edges between things and the way the human mind translates what we see, attempting to find meaning or to decipher intent through pattern recognition.
Formal legibility and hybridization are the foundations of Disruptive Continuity and the Gestalt relationships that define its logic. The hybridization of this manifold condition is also where our ability to recognize patterns is challenged, offering no clear cues for resolution while simultaneously already resolved. It is this simultaneity of this condition that is evocative and to some, disturbing. Over time I recognized this condition as a type of formal camouflage, where the individual ceases to exist and dissolves into its context. Edges disappear, and seamless continuity replaces difference. This unknowable mutation jars us from our own subconscious tendencies to categorize and assume meaning, requiring us to look deeper and more consciously again, compelled by our desire to understand. It is in these moments that we can also observe the designer’s skill and effort, their intelligence obtained through relentless experimentation producing a simultaneity that is arresting.
My interest in formal simultaneity aligned with my observations of the always-connected visual culture we now occupy and our mediated relationship to the world. Where the communication device in our pocket can emotionally, visually, and quite literally connect us to any place or anyone on the globe via an invisible, digital network that seamlessly exists in the background of our experience. The access to this network recently became a majority human condition, topping 51% globally in 2017.”
“LeProcope_Glitch02” is a combination of an original digital photograph taken during dinner one night in Paris, France in October 2008. The reflections of the interior of the restaurant “Le Procope,” my body in space, and the life of the street collapsed into the glass picture plane of the window (see +SUM images). The photo was later combined with an architectural rendering of an experimental house project testing ideas of glitch and camouflage as a means of obfuscating the primacy of formal legibility – A feedback loop within a feedback loop. After a few experiments with this as a composition, refigured through several glitch filters, the image was now liberated from the process that generated it and able to stand on its own, a new “object." This new art object no longer refers to its origin, its context, or its generative process for meaning, but encourages one to explore it for new potentials and misreadings.
This mini-project is an extension of a research trajectory titled “Patterns of Obfuscation.” Patterns of Obfuscation is further combined with “Disruptive Continuity” formal research to produce, “Disruptive Obfuscation,” a method of visually disrupting the architectural formal coherence with a new type of pattern coherence and disruption - dissolving solid figures and producing perceptual ones. It is also an exploration of media translations, where the process of transformation leaves residue within the image, a digital palimpsest of its own making.
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