ONTIC GLOW
Ontic Glow (2019-ongoing) looks at Google Earth's translation of the visible world online and reality's production of images. Combining two disparate technologies: the old mass-medium of tintypes with new mass-media imagery found in Google Earth's 3D ground view, panoramic sites and remote spaces generated by algorithms are reproduced in wet plate collodion’s tangible materiality. Irregularities inherent in the photograph's physical chemistry interact with the accidents found in the digital digestion and projection of space.
98% of the Earth’s surface is visually mapped and reduplicated into another world that, born from observation, paradoxically sits in a new beyond, one unaffected by observers, at least, conscious ones. People ask Google to show them what to see before ever seeing it for themselves so that by now, everywhere is familiar but strange. Only traces of inhabitance appear in the intangible landscapes, as if the future had already been colonized and abandoned, reflecting on the memory of a memory glossed in a naive nostalgia that really, no one has anymore.