Golden Record

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 19:00
at Loris

On view
29 Oct-19 Nov 2016

Golden Record

Oliver Krebs developed a photography witch deliberately moves between the “classical” photographic angel and a painterly context. - with its metamorphoses. In particular the documentary character of the spontaneous, fleeting aspect of the photographic image encourages to try to discover the qualities that are innate to this medium, qualities that necessarily distinguish photography from the other artistic visual media.

The search for criteria by which to judge images, which is becoming increasingly relevant in their production and selection, brought to my attention a seemingly absurd project. In 1976 NASA set up a committee to choose 115 images that would be encoded as a dataset on a golden phonograph record and then sent on a journey through outer space to communicate with potential extra-terrestrial intelligence.

The idea of portraying the whole of humankind living on our planet Earth in all its diversity to some form of intelligence that would receive this information at some distant point in space and time is gloriously absurd. But our need to explain ourselves to others is all too human and endearing.
A photography that in its directness leads to abstraction. These are images that struggle to be matter-of-fact and thereby take on something of the stage setting.