ProjectToShare Reviews

Looking at Experiments with Security Camera by Olivia.

I was trying to think of why thermal cameras are so mesmerizing to me. Photographs deliver visible light to our eyes, so the obvious first step of inventing photography is to record this visible light. Heat energy is not ordinarily visible to us, but it can still be recorded in the same way from light beyond our range of vision.

There are similar processes for capturing energy beyond our range of visible light, but the difference is that heat is something both tangible and ephemeral. We use it as a tool for physically altering materials and we are very familiar with its sensation, using it constantly to navigate and understand the world. This sensation is not what is delivered by a thermal photograph however.  Is it possible to create a photo that possesses the tangibility of heat with less of its ephemerality? An image that is physically cold in places it recorded cold and hot in places it recorded hot?

The photos by Clelia Knox weird me out existentially. Dissociating the photos from the what it must have looked like to record them, you see human energy being radiated into a cold environment. It captures the constant generation of life in relation to an imposing environment. In this way a new sensation is captured, of vitality, beyond the energy used to make these scenes visible.

I also looked at:

The Non-Line-of-Sight Camera from Spoon

Joiners from Christian Broms

Marmalade Type from Steven Montinar

Tea Ceremony from Stacy Kellner

Author: Huw Messie

http://messie.art.blog