Analog/digital (part II)
master thesis @ Academy of Applied Arts, Rijeka
(September 2014)
Humans always had the need to permanently note fleeting moments. After drawing and painting, photography became the main medium for recording moments and memories. In my master thesis at the Academy of Applied Arts, photography was an eye through which I observed my memories and tried to take note of them.
Considering the ubiquity of digital photography, I felt the need to go back to the basics of photographic image – camera obscura. This project is a hybrid of analog and digital photography, since I used both processes in the making of final images.
After experimenting with a human-sized camera obscura, I thought it was very limiting and it couldn’t depict the concept of the project accurately: I wanted to take notes of the vast and completely abstract area of my memories. So I came up with mobile camera obscura and it was the perfect way to transfer my idea.
My memories can be distorted, same as the pinhole image can be. This project represents the view of the past which was never the present. The reality is somewhere inbetween my distorted memory and what actually happened. Just because it happened in the past, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t belong to the present.
Space from my interior, from my memories, was translated into an outer world. This project’s motifs are micro-locations I have a strong connection with, but still have a hard time recalling specific memories. I dissolved this reality and the passage of time, I made everything simultaneous. Even though my present contains the past and what’s yet to come, the past I claim to recognize is not an actual past, but the past as I see it. By photographing it, this past becomes the part of the present consciousness, which means that my current consciousness contains this sleeping past, awoken present and makes my whole life simultaneous.
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
– F. Kafka
