Lucien
Samaha Project Description |
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Digital Photo, Image and Video Archive During at least six weeks of the exhibition, Lucien Samaha will use over 160 000 digital assets as a resource and as a foundation for a 'performance' based, on-site presentation of 32 years of personal photography, collected music and sound, and more recently, low resolution digital video, individually and in combination. He will borrow from his skills as an international DJ to "serve" images to his viewers, just as a DJ would "serve" songs to an audience. With the invaluable and excellent resources of the hartware curatorial and production team, Lucien Samaha has created a studio laboratory in the Phoenix Halle similar to the one he has been working in for the last few years in New York City. However, it does not include the six scanning workstations which he uses daily to digitize his negative, slide, and print archives, as he will be spending much of his time cataloguing the already digitized assets. Initially, the artist will be working daily on his archive, cataloging, inputing, and updating metadata. From this process new concepts and themes will be forged and presented on three separate screens. It might even be feasible to create larger events that could utilize additional or alternative spaces, including off site locations. During his residency in Dortmund, Lucien Samaha will continue to 'gather' more assets, both visual as well as acoustic, . Although this process will inevitably continue to feed the growing archive, his primary motivation is the experiences and the friendships he has always sought through photography. The full scope of the work will develop over the following few weeks, as the artist begins to gradually and organically solicit collaborations with select individuals or groups he meets both at the Phoenix Halle, as well as in the community at large. The collaborations will seek to create media art 'pieces' and events designed to promote increased attendance and involvement in the relaxed 'lounge' atmosphere of his studio/lab. At the very least and on a more regular basis, involvement will occur through a publication of a list of keywords and themes that visitors can request to view, and who will then hopefully engage in conversation.
A note on the Archive: My original purpose for the Archive was to organize and to make sense of the previously scattered and 'idle' large collection of my own photography, which includes over 300 000 images, and growing. As the process got under way, the archive took on a role more important than its organizational intent, and itself became a living process and an object that demanded constant care and feeding. It began to motivate me to go out more and collect more material. And although this enriched my life experience on a regular basis, it was only half the prize. The other half was the growth and analysis that occurred by adding the new images into the archive (at times up to 1500 new digital images per day). The result is an additive and constantly metamorphosizing temporal sculpture of images of a personal lifetime, luxurious in emotion and in memory, in form and in content. In a sense, the photography and the archive became an interchangeable "chicken and egg". The photography required a formal archive, and the archive demanded more photography. On a more technical and aesthetic level, as the archive was originally designed as a source of reference, and not as a collection of 'finished' images, all film was scanned at manageable low to average resolutions, and compressed for storage. Furthermore, the more efficient batch scanning process does not allow for individual attention to color and tone to each of the images. The result can often be unconventional, and at times, even unacceptable when compared to standard aesthetics in commercial, documentary, and art photography. However, since my photography is free and not confined to the demands of these other disciplines, I have embraced and I am often delighted with the 'roughness' and individuality of what I call the "reference aesthetic" as a finished, and often beautiful product for the purposes of the archive itself, of presentations thereof, and even for the production of large scale prints from relatively minute digital files. |
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