selfies unselfed is a photographic feedback loop, a series of analog-to-digital-to-analog photographs. Over a period of several weeks I made analog-digital screenshots, photographing selfies of friends from the screen of my computer with a Polaroid camera, then recapturing the analog images digitally and vice versa.
The series originated as part of the group project “Autonomous Systems” (2021, together with Alisa Kobzar, Alyssa Aska, Pablo Abelardo and Daniele Pozzi, hosted by mur.at) and was originally shown in the exhibition “as if they were flowers” at Reagenz art space Graz. Taking screenshots from an off-screen-domain exposes the mechanics of a camera, the interplay of lens and light as much as it exposes the mechanics of the screen, its pixel grid and luminescence. It challenges ways of seeing and recognition. Like in a Rorschach test the selves of the original selfies get transformed through the process of taking another picture, they become a riddle to be guessed for.
selfies unselfed is an attempt to capture and expose ways of human vision as relation. The cloud of analog photos may appear like a screenshot of its own, capturing an instant of what could be a fraction of the latent space of a neuronal network in the process of generating ever more selfies. The paper frames of the Polaroids resemble small screens. The digital images start staring back at me from their tiny squared spaces, like an endless TV feedback loop which is eventually (possibly) part of a larger organism, showing a self as a systemic process of layering, creating and transforming meanings at the threshhold of the human and the mechanism: eyes and mind confused with paper, lens and screen.
