Tezos

(Where) does it make you feel? {tearing}

Creator

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Description

{2022} :: laser print, scanner, GIMP selection tool :: @annaxmalina :: annamalina.com ------------------------ Part of a continuous body of work where I use the marching ants of GIMP, also known as marquee selection tool, to make animated drawings in my photography-based works. The dashed animated lines of this tool are meant to distinguish a selected area from the rest of the image and not as a visual component on their own. Because of that, they remain ephemeral. They can be saved in a work file, but not as an image or animated gif outside the workspace of GIMP. To do that, the image or animation has to be screen captured and reassembled. This removes the final work one step further away from both the analog original and its scanned digital version, causing its low resolution while fixing the ephemeral. The “(Where) does it make you feel?” series is concerned with recurring topics in my art explorations related to the physical materials I use, how they translate into the digital, in what way they are transformed there and what I am able to express through them and their transformation. While making it, I was influenced by Laura U. Marks’ “Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media” {2002} and especially her writing on haptic visuality and embodied spectatorship. “Haptic perception is usually defined as the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies. In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch. Haptic visuality, a term contrasted to optical visuality, draws from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinesthetics. Because haptic visuality draws on other senses, the viewer’s body is more obviously involved in the process of seeing than is the case with optical visuality. The difference between haptic and optical visuality is a matter of degree, however. In most processes of seeing both are involved, in a dialectical movement from far to near, from solely optical to multisensory. And obviously we need both kinds of visuality: it is hard to look closely at a lover’s skin with optical vision; it is hard to drive a car with haptic vision. The term haptic visuality emphasizes the viewer’s inclination to perceive haptically, but a work itself may offer haptic images. Haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image. Thus it is less appropriate to speak of the object of a haptic look than to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image.” (p.3-4)