Thoughtfactory: abstractions

developing the tradition of photographic abstraction

red abstraction

The background and the context of this digital abstraction  can be found in this post on the Encounter Studio  photo blog. The image, which   is another fragment in the abstraction series, delights in colour. 

A digital image  poses a problem:  Is the  digital work  its file, encoded and encrypted and clearly mathematical, or is it  a fulfilled, material expression of that file?  Or is it both of these? The key is the integration of  photography into the network milieu with the emergence of new practices for circulating and archiving everyday images (eg., on Flickr). The  makes the photograph's   condition one in which the image increasingly functions as a form of data regulated by statistical/algorithmical processes.

A well known  reading of abstraction in the visual arts has its roots in the abstraction expression of the 1950s---these artworks, which negated representational content,  express their artists’ interiorities or intense  subjectivities; or more accurately, they were  expressions of  the artist feelings in an industrial capitalist society. These  art works were an antidote’ to the dominant rationality of capitalism, its automated production and mass consumer culture.   

This account  no  longer makes sense  of  the abstract  digital image in a world of camera as computers, meta-data and algorithmic analysis.