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MTAA-RR » news » twhid » manual zoom mirage redux:

May 14, 2011

Manual Zoom Mirage

posted at 13:39 GMT by T.Whid in /news/twhid

MTAA will be web residents on Lee Walton’s blog this month (or week or something). I have no idea what M.River plans to do but I’m thinking I might revisit some of our (what I consider) under-appreciated past work.

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The first piece in this little nostalgia trip is 2003’s IN PREPARATION FOR THE SUMMER AIR IN BROOKLYN TO RISE FROM THE CONCRETE IN A MANNER WHICH DISTORTS ONE’S ABILITY TO JUDGE DISTANCE AND MEANING (AKA MANUAL ZOOM MIRAGE).



We did this in the early summer of ‘03 for our friend Dan’s gallery, Rome Arts. The gallery was in a storefront on Havermeyer St. in Brooklyn.

It was a solo show! The catch? The gallery couldn’t really be open all summer so the show had to be viewable from the sidewalk. You’re thinking and we said at the time, “you must be joking.”

Yeah, anyway.

We decided the show would consist of 1 image. The image would be printed on a postcard announcing the show. The postcard WAS the show.



The piece was very formal in a way. It was very interested in where the digital image lies, where does it exist? We put a big print of the image in the gallery, yet everyone had the *exact* same thing on the postcards they received. In the gallery it was just printed bigger. It was also on the web, freely-licensed (Creative Commons licensing was very new at the time).

It’s purpose was to try to get the viewer to question their relationship to a digital, infinitely-reproducible image. To try to get them to notice that that the image exists in a sort of invisible blur across time and space. Except, it doesn’t. You and it are here and now. So in point 8 in the text in the image:

Due to the fact this artwork contains a 1:8 scale model card, the “actual artwork,” the prediction of the hottest temperature ever, and an act of looking through the window into Rome Arts, we need to note that the “really, really actual artwork” is the accumulation of all these objects and moments.


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Once I started thinking about doing this post I decided I’d like to release something new to go along with it. To that end, I’ve created a new black and white SVG version of the ‘hot head’ illustration in Manual Zoom Mirage. Click on the GIF preview below to download the SVG version. hot_head_bw.gif
(SVG; 49KB) permanent link to this post

MTAA-RR » news » twhid » manual zoom mirage redux


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