Alan Warburton
*1980, lives and works in London (England)
Today the image in photography and video is synthetic – the real and algorithmic worlds of non-uniform moments collide and intersect. In Alan Warburton’s film Spherical Harmonics these superimpositions are compartmentalized and isolated into self-contained protagonists.
So the human figure, based on a digital readymade, is decomposed into the constituent layers of the rendering process. The character Maya, named after the 3d application used, impassively watches the dissolution of her world: light sources decouple from their physical properties and penetrate walls, perfectly mirroring surfaces reveal their algorithmic origin through a smearing flicker and birds cluster into a multiple exposure in the spirit of Étienne-Jules Marey.
Through the dissection of the components of the synthetic image Warburton unveils their basic truth and reflects on how the over-idealization of reality might shape or limit the liberty of thought.
The work is a preview of Penetrating Surfaces an extensive screening curated by Robert Seidel (http://www.robertseidel.com) for the Film Museum Vienna (May 24 and 25, 2014). It deliberates on the materially-inherent aesthetic potential of the digital, a search above and beyond the boundaries of software and its media metaphors.
