zoom
A debit card; a scalpel; a wall. The familiar objects in life often go ignored. This project seeks to defamiliarise the ordinary by magnifying and focusing on the surfaces, textures and crevices of the world around us. It seeks to find the ontological essence of the object beyond our immediate perception of it, searching for the implications of the physical artefact beyond itself. Using analog and digital techniques I attempt to capture fragmented traces of these worlds and explore their part-to-whole relationship.
What is a debit card? A payment device. A pocket sized container of imaginary numbers. A sliver of green plastic with a horse on it. We strip the accepted definition of this familiar object back in a search for its ontological essence. We trap it under the lens of a microscope and begin to traverse its scarred surface, documenting and rebuilding it digitally. We are able to see a level of visual richness to this object that is imperceptible to the naked eye. We see it in Parts, detached from its Whole, and we forget what we already know to see the thing that is actually there.
We travel into an everyday toolbox. A scalpel? A screwdriver? Monumentalised and enlarged to epic proportions. The camera becomes an observer and we caress our way through this haptic world; our eyes become fingertips. The focus is to see to what extent we understand the toolbox as the sum of its parts, and the implication of these artefacts beyond themselves. Can we record these parts in such a way that we produce a distorted iteration of their whole? We linger at points of interest, as we would in a walk through the park, to allow the pale x10 projection to collect on the surface of the observant paper and expose it, leaving its eternal trace. We film through the scope; rotating, charging and tumbling through the 0.1 mm planes of focus, trying to make sense of this fragmented world.