HYPERBOLIC BIOTOPOLOGICAL PHOTOGRAPHY

In this study using hyperbolic and computational photography, Bob Bowen subjects the Bioscleave House, East Hampton, to a machinic perception mimicking the perspective-driven distortions of human perception.

MULTIPERSPECTIVE STUDIES

Like the mesmerizing analytic cubo-futurism of Pavel Filonov, Bowen’s machinic capture yields world sliced into shards of perspective, blobs of perspective, streaks of perspective and smudges of the act of looking. A medium for recording vision with the sort of approximative-rigor we bring to it. Hyperbolic in fidelity to the biotopology of encountering the Bioscleave House.

Bob showed his film “The Long Island House” (min: 14:50) – at The Proceeding Procedure held at Glasshouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, June 4-7 2014. His project of studying perception through optical computational experimentations in and around the Bioscleave House is ongoing. Look for more of Bob’s work in subsequent issues of the Procedures Journal.

 

ABOUT BOB BOWEN’S PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE

(the artist’s words, taken from http://robertbowenartny.com/index.php/hyperbolic-photographs/)

All of the photographs in this section were taken at Bioscleave House, an experimental art-science perceptual research station, designed by Arakawa and Gins and located in East Hampton, NY. They shouldn’t be approached as documentary photographs however, because my intention in choosing this site was to use it as it in the way it was designed to be used, in my case as a location for creating experimental photographic artworks that model different aspects of visual perception.

All photographs are abstractions of what we actually see. Though most photographers don’t think about that, throughout the history of photography a relatively small group of sophisticated individuals have used this information to create brilliant images that deliberately push the boundaries of reality and abstraction. But even the careful attentiveness to reality seen in those works scarcely pays lip service to a discourse on the essential differences between what a camera sees and what we see.

 

Using what I think of as “computational cameras,” (a combination of high resolution photographic capture and 3D computer graphics – CGI) I have sought to make pictures that model human vision by attempting to teach a camera to see the way we see rather than the reverse. In other words, I attempt to photograph the act of seeing, and my intention is that through viewing these works an observer may become more subtly attentive to their own phenomenological experience of real-time visual thinking.

 

 

 

“Comfort is no longer a factor. That it might take several hours to go from one room to another in a reversible destiny house is of no importance as long as the sensibility of the person traversing the room flowers and catches on itself in transit.”   (A+G, We Have Decided Not to Die p.241)