Angelos Floros

Published: Floros A., "The Image is a Place", in Spyros Papadimitriou (ed.), Digital Topographies, Futura Publications, Athens, 2005, ISBN 960-7960-90-1, pp. 86-89

Exhibited: Self Portrait, Digital Topographies, Technical Chamber of Greece / HELEXPO, Thessaloniki, 2005

Made at: Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Tutor: Jean-Marc Gauthier

An image is a sight, which has been recreated or reproduced.

Images were first used to bring back an object that was absent. Gradually they did something else: they made what they represented last. So an image shows that certain things once existed — and, by extension, that they were once seen by somebody. The way of seeing of whoever made the image became part of the bequest, together with the image itself. What survives is a record of how X saw Y.

And yet, although every image carries a way of looking inside it, our own reading of it depends on our own eyes.

From which follows the claim of the title. The image is a new kind of place. It is the presentation of things detached from the time and the place where they first appeared, preserved for a few minutes or for several centuries.

We never see only one thing. We are always looking at the relation between ourselves and what is in front of us. Our sight is continuously active, continuously moving, holding a series of things around it — and those things are what constitutes the present for us. From the moment we are able to see, we understand that we can also be seen. The gaze of the other converses with our own, until it becomes entirely credible that we are part of the visible world.

The argument follows John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

Self Portrait puts that into a room. A visitor stands before a framed board and watches an animation of a particle system of pixels. Slowly they recognise a presence in it: a face, and then their own face, a portrait reassembled out of moving squares. A mechanical eye captures the visitor; a complex of algorithms works as a generating machine that analyses, fractalises and finally constructs their image. When the portrait is complete, the process begins again with the next person.

The work belongs to a longer investigation in digital painting, which started by using two-dimensional space as a canvas and then extended into three-dimensional virtual space.