Mike Downing
A collaboration between software algorithms and a human obfuscator, Accrual Media remixes the seminal book of photographic theory, Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, asserting the reordering of the way the photographic image itself is created and disseminated in the 21st century, over 35 years since the original’s publication.
Each page of the original publication has been scanned and subjected to a partially human-guided application of Adobe’s Space Time Video Completion algorithm, put into action through Photoshop’s various Content Aware processes. These alterations prioritise the visual aspect of written language over the coded content and meaning, leading to repeated passages and words, altered letter forms and entirely new sentences or visual patterns – generated through invisible and ‘magical’ coding.
Where Barthes, over 119 pages, wrangles with the ‘soul’ of the human-mediated and generated object/image, Accrual Media prioritises the objective aspects and ‘mechanics’ of digital imaging, without respect for the stature, heritage and intended meaning of the source material.
Mike Downing is a UK-based photographic artist and lecturer at the University of Lincoln. His multidisciplinary practice responds directly to emerging themes of online connected societies in visual culture. His work covers diverse themes, such as the animal loving self-identifying supporters of extreme right-wing groups, rural phone networks and reworkings of the classical ‘vanitas’ in plastic.