Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art

Opening Friday, 12. September 2008 at 7 p.m.
Duration: 13. September – 1. November 2008
Opening Hours: Tue – Fri 2 – 6 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m – 2 p.m

Osterwalder´s Art Office
Isestrasse 37, 20144 Hamburg, Germany
Tel. ++ 040 486109

above left, Tim Head ‘Dust Flowers’, 2008; above right, Susan Collins ‘Fenlandia, 25th March 2005’

On Saturday 6th September 2008 from 10 a.m. – 10 p.m. as part of the „Rote Punkt“ Gallery Tours Osterwalders Art Office will be showing Susan Collins’ „Glenlandia“ 2 years archive, 12 hrs of moving image projection and Tim Head’s „Wildfire 2004“ Realtime Computer program and LCD Screen.)

Through their parallel working practices Tim Head and Susan Collins explore the properties of digital media in distinct and inventive ways. Susan Collins’ recent work employs transmission, networking and time as primary materials creating digital representations of landscape where each pixel represents a unit of time. Tim Head bypasses image as representation by using solely the prime physical elements of the medium to form the work.

For Tim Head, the elusive and contrary nature of the digital medium and its unsettled relationship with both ourselves and with the physical world forms the basis for recent work. Computer programs are written to generate unique events in ‘real time’ on screens, projections and inkjet prints that focus on the intrinsic properties of these digital media. The programs operate at the primary scale of the medium’s smallest visual element (the pixel or inkjet dot) by treating each element as a separate individual entity. The medium is no longer transparent but opaque.

Susan Collins‘ gradually unfolding, classically romantic landscape images are harvested and archived over the course of the year. They encode the landscape over time, with different tonal horizontal bands recording fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and with broad bands of black depicting night-time. Stray pixels appear in the image where the moon passes through or a bird, person, car or other unidentifiable object passes in front of the webcam as the pixel is captured. The work is intended to be slow, a reflection on the ever increasing speeds we demand from the internet. Poised between the still and the moving image, the lens and the pixel, the prints explore how images can be coded and decoded using both light and time as building blocks for the work.

Slow Fields is the first time these two bodies of work will be shown together.