Tahir Hemphill: Living Audio
Artist(s):
Title:
- Living Audio
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2002
Medium:
- serigraph on Arches paper
Size:
- 15 x 15 inches
Category:
Artist Statement:
With this work, I am interested in applying a hands-on, organic approach to otherwise precise art forms. In exploring the influence of digital culture’s cut-and-paste phenomena, I employ multilayering, sampling, and repetition of images. These appropriation and remixing techniques are found in modern electronic music production as well as older artistic forms such as quilt making. In doing this, I hope to perpetuate these traditional cultural concepts while adapting them to a new technological terrain.
Process Information:
Living Audio is the print that started this whole series. I began working on a new project by designing high-contrast graphics in Photoshop, with the desire to recombine my photographs and other source material into an image that was digital with an analog aesthetic. After working for an hour, the file used up the computer’s free memory and it started crashing. Each time I pushed the button on the mouse, the computer would sample part of the image and randomly move this square shape to another part of the grid. I began to see a pattern and the connection between my input and the output on the screen. I printed out each new image, scanned the printouts, and used them to design my final graphic. I distilled each piece down to four separate colors. Negatives were made of each color and plates were made from the negatives. I have produced serigraphs and etchings of the designs. Taking advantage of the pure random nature of the glitch in the computer system, I used this process as the conceptual framework for the whole series.
In each subsequent design, I draw from the random multilayering and repetition employed by the first experience.
