monologue with K.L.

by mr

monologue with K.L. test 02 from miro roman on Vimeo.

Monologue with Kristina Lenard is a project created as part of a research at the MAS CAAD ETH Program in Zürich. The focus of this specialist study is the way in which information technologies and the Internet are changing architecture, visual arts and society in general. This study program relies on the premises that the environment which surrounds us cannot be perceived through categories of matter and energy alone. Rather, in order to create a bigger picture, one should also use the category of information. Among the multitude of information which surround us, we should seek for a state of stability which could enable us to observe them.

One should bear in mind, however, that although information codes are significantly transforming contemporary picture of the world, they in fact consist of no inherent “truth” or default meanings, but are subject to reflections of our empirical categories – thinking, knowledge, different skills –through which they gain meaning. In this way, the process of encoding imposes cultural, mathematical and technological implications onto various programming paradigms in order to make their whole potential fully understandable. Coding is thus an ideal platform for examining the potential of the information technology.

The piece called Monologue with Kristina Lenard, created in reference to Kristina Lenard, was originally inspired by her work Think Space in which she questions different levels of reality. The work itself explores the medium of photography, its credibility, as well as the relationship between the real and the constructed.
Kristina Lenard`s photograph shows a natural landscape that has nothing to do with the idea of the landscape it represents. It is an artificially constructed photograph of an artificially constructed landscape. The actual model of the landscape had been made of bonsai trees and moss, while the photograph is a reflection of that landscape model in a Claude glass mirror. By using a Claude glass or a black mirror – a Baroque painting tool – as the medium, it is possible to abstract redundant details around the subject in the reflected environment.

The aim of the work Monologue with Kristina Lenard was to observe ways in which the process of abstraction can change or redefine the meaning of an image.
The tool I used and developed specifically for this work was Pixel Image Processing script. The reference point was Kristina Lenard’s Think Space photograph. The idea was to generate third abstraction of the same landscape using a computer. The relation between the new render and the photograph was equivalent to the relation between the photograph and the reality of the landscape it represented. Kristina Lenard’s photograph thus became the input (raw material). In her work, we looked at every nth (100th) pixel and its general characteristics (r, g, b, brightness) in order to collect information needed to develop each pixel into a unique complex branched system. Each pixel thus evolved into a small constellation defined by its own characteristics. With each new iteration the system became yet more complex. Since each pixel had different characteristics, it developed completely individually, while mutual overlapping resulted in the formation of single entities/compositions.

If we perceive Kristina Lenard’s photograph as the second abstraction of reality, which uses the model of the landscape as raw material, the newly produced render can only be perceived as the third abstraction which uses her photograph as raw material. This leads us to the conclusion that the obtained render is equally (un)realistic as the photograph, or rather, that it represents just one of the dimensions of reality, defined by the same type of parameters as the photograph.


done with processing