Today’s reading by Christian Ervin (The Camera, Transformed by Machine Vision), got me thinking about the uncanny; that feeling of something just being slightly “off”; the joy and horror in recognizing something eerily familiar.
This reminded me of Tom Sachs and his Tea Ceremony exhibition. It’s a full-blown rendition of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, in which Sachs crafts every detail of the experience by hand – lanterns, gates, a koi pond, a bronze bonsai, bowls, ladles, vases… – all from everyday materials found at hardware stores, recycling piles, scrap heaps, etc. This leaves each element sort of “perfectly imperfect” and totally uncanny, just like the real thing but somehow more human.
At a lecture of his I attended a few years ago, Sachs described this need for the human touch:
“An iPhone, arguably the greatest thing ever made, has no evidence that a human being made it.”
His fingerprints in the porcelain tea bowls allows him to “write [his] own mythology” on the origin and existence of objects. This feels relevant to Experimental Capture, not just because of uncanny GAN-rendered images, but also as an opportunity for us to seek ways to inject a human touch into the images we produce.
