The Drawing Board

Photo taken by iPhone camera resting on an elliptical work-out machine.

Hexadecimals are comprised of alphanumerical combinations that relate to RGB values.

Why is this an important step in deconstructing digital images?

Hexadecimals are a code that computers use to break down information into a binary language, which is how computers store information. The thing you are seeing on your screen that represents the photograph is the interpretation of such data into objects, color, composition, etc. Showing the hexadecimal make-up of a photograph is one way to show the procedural break-down of any digital image into a computer-native format. Unless you are working in pure analog, this is the “material” make-up of any photo you are looking at. It’s no longer text, image, object. It’s something like; text/image, object.

When dealing with issues of identity in the digital realm, we spend most of our time filling up social networking pages with info about who we are with specific points of interest and photographs in an attempt to create a specific identity, however, it is in this quest for identity that we lose it. As we fill up databases with info about who we are, we essentially give over ourselves. We spend so much time curating our own identities, that in the end, it is all we have. Baudrillard says in reference to why he doesn’t take photos of human subjects:

“…but in the end it’s always the subject that vanishes behind the lens. But this can be transposed elsewhere. Perhaps the species, by inventing a multiplicity of virtual connections, is finding a way of losing itself in the immensity of the networks. In the technical universe, the real actor is not the one you think he is. The rules of the game are doubtless not what you think they are either.”

–Paroxysm, Interviews with Phillippe Petit

One iteration into my investigation of stripping the object from the photograph and using pure color to represent the photographic play of light.