LUKE PARKER

“Sculpture”

BEN REID

Slow Clap

The sculptural works featured in Ben Reid’s Slow Clap explore a series of collisions performed on the virtual body of an anonymous user extracted from a public, web-based 3D asset library. This digital body was downloaded and altered into a seated, clapping pose, suggesting a kind of passive, token presence. The body was then subjected to a series of velocity collisions using a physics engine in animation software. The length of each collision is based on five common “dwell-time” thresholds associated with Instagram. Dwell time refers to how long a user pauses on a piece of content. Instagram tracks small movements and pauses, including movements of the thumb, to predict what might interest or affect a user and then uses this information to shape what appears in their feed.

The resulting sculptures are figurative reliefs created through a combination of chance and digital physics. In this sense, the process draws on Marcel Duchamp’s use of chance and mechanical systems in the production of art. The collisions transform the muscular, gym-built bodies into something soft, flexible and defenseless..

Slow Clap challenges familiar ideas about masculine virility as presented and understood through online and parasocial relationships. While simultaneously prodding proprietary in the way copyrighted digital material found online can be used as a transformative means for artistic representation.

Luke Parker’s “Sculpture” references Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the inframince: the imperceptible thresholds and gaps between things. Positive and negative, paper and photopaper, subject and object, sculpture and photograph become unstable categories. Parker’s newest exhibition occupies these spaces of transition, where one thing slips into another and intention becomes entangled with use.

Of the 17,098 photographs in Parker’s iPhone, 447 appeared when he entered the word “sculpture” into the Photo app search function. These algorithmically categorised photographs form his newest body of work. Often working within self-imposed parameters, Parker uses restriction as a generative framework, focusing attention while unsettling meaning.

‘Sculpture’ presents these iPhone photographs transformed into silver gelatin ‘contact’ prints. Through a sequence of translations, the original images are reversed, degraded and materially transformed. The resulting negatives appear uncanny in the truest sense of the word: both familiar and strange. Each stage introduces a loss or distortion, but also a movement towards materiality. What begins as an image on a phone becomes a photographic object. The process shifts the images between states – digital and analogue, positive and negative, image and object – until the photograph itself begins to occupy the territory of sculpture.

Images Courtesy of Zan Wimberley