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in deutsch
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New York: "Blick vom World Trade Center auf die Statue of Liberty"
C-Print 165 x 223 cm, Holzrahmen, Glas.
Auflage: 5
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2004
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Digital Album
THE RECALCULATED PICTURE
What does a picture display? Conservatively speaking, a picture always displays colours and shapes. We could hardly imagine a
picture without colours, even if it is black and white. In all its tones, white is always a more or less consistent blend of
all colours. As a colour, black possesses such a low luminosity that the chromatic value is no longer perceptible to the human
eye. Shapes are likewise to be found in every picture, even though they often take on a form that is not yet accessible to our
conceptual repertoire. But to date the art world has always succeeded in embracing such phenomena, and we can be sure that it
will continue to do so in future.
The pictures in Andrej Barov’s ‘Digital Album’ series show familiar shapes: columns of letters and digits. But they do not
have any meaning. The meaning of each picture is supplied by the respective title, for example ‘Vienna’, ‘New York’. Perhaps
it would be safer to say that the meaning of the shapes is at least not obvious to the human observer. Yet it is incorporated
in these shapes. Just as a plant is not stored as a miniaturised specimen in its seeds, but in some other form. But can we
make the meaning of pictures accessible to ourselves, just as it is readable to the computer as a code that has been created
by us for the latter? Although made by the human hand (and intellect), the meaning of computer codes will always remain an
enigma, as has already been shown in another similar case. We are familiar with the architecture of the perceptive apparatus
and nerve system of the bat and yet we do not know, and never will know, what it is like to be a bat.
It becomes evident to the observer of the ‘Digital Album’ that his special notion of the world has always been in his
attitude, i.e. the human being understands with the naked eye. The objects in the case of ‘Digital Album‘ these are views
of different cities do not assume a different form, they merely display the same form in a different way. They are no
longer tailored to people, as has been usual ever since the paintings of the Renaissance, but calculated for the computer.
That is a novelty.
It is, however, not the only explication in ‘Digital Album’. Various city views are not only to be seen in unusual terms,
but also in a conceptual code that enables their exact mechanical reproducibility. The possible correspondence between the
individual exhibits is for the first time complete, i.e. there is neither an original nor a copy. At the same time the
conceptual code permits new possibilities of manipulation that are no longer induced by the photographed object or the
photographic technique in the widest sense of the word, but by variations in the conceptual code. Such variations permit for
the first time the step into the three-dimensionality of photography, of each individual photograph.
‘Digital Album’ is digital photography in each of these ways. It manifests itself in the form of the computer code of the
pictures themselves. ‘Digital Album’ in this sense is, according to Theo van Doesburg, concrete art, in the first and last
instance ‘concrete digital photography‘.
Karsten M. Thiel
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