Feedback
2012-2013

As Seen Here
University of British Columbia MFA Thesis Exhibition
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2013

35mm digital transparencies, slide projectors, projected video (5:09)

Feedback takes as its point of departure the transition from analog to digital in lens-based media and the subsequent conditions of obsolescence and technological latency. Fascinated with the contemporary phenomenon of the degraded circulating image, Henderson investigates how digitally-mediated viewing has altered forms of subjectivity, perception, and experience. For Feedback Henderson investigated the economy and poetics of the collectively photographed and shared digital image of spectacle. This work gleans from a series of low-res Internet-sourced photographs and videos that depict the  destruction of Eastman Kodak factories in 2006 and 2007.

Four Kodak slide projectors mechanically click their way through halftone representations of sublime destruction, a visual and aural stutter that measures our sense of time and space within the gallery. Projected on the far wall, the video excludes all extraneous imagery to focus on looming, pixelated dust clouds that are abstracted beyond comprehension when altered and compressed. The fluctuating materiality and mutated quality of the digital cloud resonates with the viral toxicity of images in circulation and the trail of varying digital formations left behind in their wake.

This process of appropriation and re-inscription attempts to re-materialize the digital and give physical form to an intangible substance. Through the use of screens, Kodak slide projectors, and digital transparencies as foils for the analogue, Henderson’s anachronistic work seeks to recode the digital substrate and the structures that bind two seemingly opposed image-based technologies.

Installation views: Michael Barrick