The Sun at Midnight

Digital video still

Social Networking Coincidences

Digital image from screengrab, 2012

Two photos occurring consecutively in my Facebook news feed. They were uploaded within the space of an hour by two people, one in Europe and one in the Middle East. I find these little visual coincidences interesting.

Glitch Art: Birthday Card

Digital image from digital photograph

I have recently been exploring the Glitch Art movement, a term used for the creation of artwork through inducing "glitches" while reading digital files. For James Allard's birthday card I began with the photograph he uses for his profile picture (taken by Mark Hurrell), opened the JPEG in a text editor then copied and pasted text from his Facebook profile into the code that made up the image. This was the result of opening it in the image preview software of Windows 7. I had to save it again in order for other software to recognise it as a valid rather than corrupt file.

The interesting thing about this is that what you see above is not the glitch itself, but a documentary record of the glitch - like a photograph of an event. The glitch occurs during the act of opening the file, and the result will vary depending on the software and operating system of the computer etc.

A glitch also serves as a reminder of the fact that you are not looking at a landscape with figures and an electricity pylon, but a collection of different coloured pixels on a computer screen which have been arranged in a certain way, and could be laid out in a totally different way. A bit like Magritte's painting "The Treachery of Images".

For more on Glitch Art I recommend Rosa Menkman's blog, Sunshine in my Throat.

Self Portrait 01

Self Portrait 01

Digital image from scanner, 2011.

Frame of Reference / Violent Universe

These are concept art pieces for Magnetic Foragers, the audio-visual collaboration I am working on with James Allard. Watercolour, charcoal and permanent marker on board, digitally manipulated.

 Frame of Reference

 Frame of Reference (Detail)

 Violent Universe 1

Violent Universe 2

Searching For Permanence

Himalaya

This summer I was asked to design a cover for a seven inch record by the band Sad Lovers and Giants. Although the singer championed it, the other members were in disagreement. They created a very different but appropriate image, which I will link to here if it becomes available online.