Bennett, A 2014, Skin Room, animated gif, held at Widget Art Gallery [online], 16 October – 16 November 2014.
The virtual gallery that fits in your pocket curated by Chiara Passa presents a monthly solo digital art exhibition. Artists are invited to respond to the site specific context of the gallery: works that are designed to be viewed on a mobile screen.
The ‘skin’ of the Widget Art Gallery gave me the opportunity to continue my investigation of surface in digital images in a new way. The photographic image has shifted from a literal surface – a print – to an interconnected ephemeral surface, a skin-scape, reconstituted via screens and code. Given the cultural convergence between biological and digital skin, I have been working with detailed images of human skin as a metaphor for surface that I then transform in an effort to ‘see under the hood’, to gain insight into how ‘surface’ operates within digital media. I have used the classic glitch strategy of transposing one value into another – in this case the surface data within the skin image has been transposed into depth data and used to form the 3D shape out of the 2D skin. The WAG space presents a perfect frame for this transposed flesh – both room as skin and screen as skin.
http://the-widget-art-gallery.blogspot.com.au/
http://www.chiarapassa.it/TheWidgetArtGallery.html
Alison Bennett 