*21 scans of overexposed 35mm B/W film negatives,
digitally edited version of each of the scans
*These days, our world is occupied by three different kinds of natures, co-existing both in symbiosis and never-ending conflict:
The first or “true” nature, which would be associated most with the actual term of “nature”, consisting of everything that came into existence organically, through natural causes.
The second, human-based nature, that once emerged from humans as one of these exact products of first nature and has ironically over time become its biggest source of danger: As humanity progressively evolved themselves and their needs, they also started building up an environment to fit these new standards in order to create more comfort for themselves, concrete buildings and asphalt streets—surroundings which now seem both ordinary and essential to us—being built on the ground of true nature, replacing and consequently destroying it in the process.
The third, machine-based nature originated as a recent one of these human-based inventions: Once developed as simply yet another tool to make human life easier, machines and especially computer-based technology have evolved to the point of now being considered their own nature, a digital space that exists like a second world apart from the physical one. Especially with novel technologies such as artificial intelligence, it becomes clear that this third nature has by now also obtained the ability to create, repeating the process of what once happened to first nature, this time however destroying our human-based environments instead.
EX3 deals with the concept of a trinity of natures—consisting of a true, a human-based and a machine-based nature—both co-existing and competing within our modern-day world as well as the mistakes to be found within each of them. Two hearts, both the rounded, organically shaped and the inverted, edgy and pixel-like, that are inevitably facing each other.
With the basis of analog photographs shot on black-and-white 35mm film, portraying scenes of construction sites and other typical samples of modern human-made environments, the project represents one of the many human-based technologies that have by now been overshadowed by newer, digital inventions as well as the inevitable uncertainty of human-made mistakes that comes with it. The product of this human-based process is a self-developed film with unintentionally overexposed negatives, the images hidden within a strip of black rectangles, impossible of being perceived by the human eye. The actual photographs are only to be revealed through a second, technological development of the negatives, a digital scan finally making the images visible. Grain turning into pixels, human-made mistakes corrected by a machine.
At the same time, there however also lies an unreliable nature within these technologies, a world of cryptic, intangible devices that are just as capable of making mistakes, of destroying, as humanity is. As an examination of this commonly forgotten reality, the computer itself is given the power to retouch the scanned images, purposefully letting it act incorrectly. The individual photos are being destroyed by the exact medium that had just now created them, revealing the universal reality of transience that will inevitably be a part of any type of nature.
(2023)