The Digital City Series is a worldwide journey that began around the fall of 2007 in Amsterdam. After years of experimentation with combining the mediums of painting and photography, I wanted to begin a new series, using only digital photography. In 2003, I made the Art Collision Series, and this was the first time that I experimented with photo manipulation and painting. The four images were a collage of New York City photographs, printed on canvas, then worked over two times each with acrylic paint, creating a total of 8 paintings. At the time, I knew that I would eventually make on ‘all digital’ series, but decided to push the painting side more, and began the Vanishing Landscape Series. This series uses one urban photograph (so far San Francisco, New York City and Amsterdam) heat-transfered to a small part of the canvas and then worked to the edges with acrylic paint. Shortly after beginning the Digital City Series, I discovered how the Vanishing Landscape gave me an important skill for observing the Digital City - being able to see the lines.
While on a trip with the Gerrit Reitveld Art Academy, I travelled to my first city with camera in hand - Basel, Switzerland. At this point, I have to admit, I had quite a few ideas in my head, like trying to represent certain categories and structures and how they relate to each other in one environment or another - these sort of things. Well hey, I was hanging around an art school at the time, these type of things can happen. I did push through the Basel image with this idea in mind, but feel that the image still fits within the broader perspective that the Digital City has grown into. I’ve realized that putting these kind of parameters around a large subject, like this, would only be limiting. I mean, I’ve been around a bit and I’ve meet a few people, but I’ve barely been everywhere and hardly meet everybody in this world. It seemed a bit presumptuous that it would be worthwhile for me to just go and document these places and present them in predefined categories. And besides, this type of thing has definitely been done before. Better to let the environment tell the story and learn how to listen. I mean, what’s really going on these days? Modern Art ain’t even modern and then Contemporary Art ain’t so contemporary anymore either. It can be damn confusing. But still, everybody seems real interested in writing the next chapter of this book, mostly trying to write the end. The problem seems to be that the number of final chapters and endings has pilled up so much, that it’s like watching a movie where the footage of possible endings is longer than the plot. At some point, your gonna duck out and pop over the the other theater in the cineplex and be happy watching some stupid action film, just to get your mind off all this post-post-post sumtin’ business. Or better yet, just go outside. Observe. Listen.
The Digital City exists in a parallel world. However much it may come close to representing the actual, in the end it all boils down to the simplest of dualities - 0 and 1. So the closer it can come to rendering reality, the closer it can come to expressing the plurality, which is the real world around us. Everybody knows that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. After taking this approach to the series, it became clear that it was more interesting to let the cities reveal themselves to me, rather than construct the images with my own pre-concieved notions. Every city has specific lines within its contours, that can be connected to reveal this parallel digital world, from all the angles and perspectives that encompass the actual city. The more I can blend, the more I can hope to bring these connections to light. Although, I have found it a bit difficult to really get going on the cities I already know quite well, namely, San Francisco and Amsterdam. Must be that I have so many connections with these places and it’s always hard to see the familiar with fresh eyes. Well, I figured, all in due time, the lines are there and I shall find them, when the time is right.
The intention for the Digital City has always been to produce the high resolution image, and this is definitely still the case. But along the way, I began to accumulate this extra digital information, like the photographs I took for the images and snapshots of the process. I also began writing short texts about ideas and experiences I had in the cities. I guess this happened partly because I was struggling a bit in writing the first ‘about statement’ and decided, at that point, to push forward and add a bit of creativity to the writing, rather then step backwards and try to just document. Creativity is only yes or no. Only computers and those tiny quantum physics things can be 0 and 1 at the same time, we humans have to chose one or the other, because we are part of the plurality. So it seemed natural to take these extras and find a place for them in our digital world - the internet. I started a blog, in part to be the first place that the images are to be presented, but also as a place where the original photographs and text could be posted across different platforms and web spaces, connecting the elements in ways like geotagging the original pictures on google maps and linking the text to the greater web. This lets the audience recreate the story to whatever extent they feel fit and also helps build these parallel cities within our digital world.
Having said that, I would also like to say that seeing these images at actual print size (and some day, even larger), is nothing like seeing them on the web. That much is obvious. The more you see the more you get, but I would like to point out the difference between how digital media in the digital world, propagates itself extensively and how digital media that has been made physical (in this case printed), becomes limited and rare. I like to think that this difference broadens and compliments the whole project. We know what the Egyptians were talking about thousands of years ago, because they straight hammered it into solid rock, who’s gonna be able to read our e-books, when our rubble is found in the future? Anyways, I’m just gonna keep on doing my thing, more cities and more stories. See you out there.
- Bernard Bolter
