Infomorphosis

Exploring the new paradigm of visual culture over the textual in the post modern world.

In contemporary society, technical images have taken over the task formerly served by linear texts, that is, the task of transmitting information crucial to society and to individuals. A world of screens (mosaic surfaces) all connected ephemerally through the network through which the image accelerates, feeding our desire for visual language. Through the likes of dominating social media platforms, the technical image has proliferated, heralding the current shift of a society that manufactured goods to a society that now manufactures information. What happens to the way we, as artists, understand our roll in this post industrial society?

“Towards a Philosophy of Photography” – Vilém Flusser

In this artwork I explore the transformation of a textual culture (the linearity of history) into a visual culture (technical images) by reappropriating a philosophy essay (Towards a Philosophy of Photography by Vilém Flusser) into a technical image.

The process began with converting the essays (English) text into a usable dataset. This was achieved through utilising the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) table, an encoding standard for electronic communication, to generate a very long number string.

This number string was then converted into a dataset of x,y,z co-ordinates, made up of almost 49 000 rows.

This dataset was then used to generate a point cloud and render out a 3 dimensional computation of the concept. The linear stream of text becomes a counter-informative reservoir of information, jamming historical happenings and abstracting consciousness.