The Love Machine II, 2003, Digital print on aluminium
3 images: 62.72cm x 74.1cm
2 images: 60cm x 135cm
1 image: 249.58cm x 15.1cm
About the work
The Love Machine II looks at a new variety of exhibited object produced by the play of digital imaging – the morpheme. The morpheme represents the hybridity between technology and flesh, which computer imaging makes possible. It is also representative of a tension located within the logic of digital technology itself. This develops between the hierarchical, orderly processing and storing of data in the computer on the one hand, and the chaos and confusion of information which deletes itself, mutates and transforms, on the other.
The idea for The Love Machine II was developed from rethinking a kind of photographic booth first in use throughout Asia in the late 1990s. These booths use software to capture portraits of individual sitters and then output a ‘baby’ image combining the features of the original two images in conjunction with racial and gender presets. Thus the original context of this booth could be seen as literally digital ‘reproduction’. Rather than one subject, it requires a couple, in fact the couple. Its Japanese manufacturers, while obviously cashing in on the novelty value, nevertheless list as an advantage its ability to let the couple ‘see’ what their progeny would be like for future matrimonial selection based on a suitable aesthetic.
Reworking the aesthetic, technological and cultural ramifications of this process, the artists produce an image installation of a series of portraits. The final work is presented in a ‘booth-like’ atmosphere with originally passport size photos scaled up to overwhelm and envelop the viewer. The installation incorporates six still images, which display detailed enlargements of images taken from the actual booths. The poor quality of the images becomes obvious when they are viewed on an enlarged scale, and the artists deliberately play with this ‘poor quality’ against the promise of perfection through choice that the original booth seems to offer. These images are magnifications, even explosions, of the social archetypes embedded in the process of this form of image taking: that is, ‘the couple’, ‘the perfect child’, and ‘the genetic mutation’.
About the artists
Michele Barker
Born 1969 AustraliaLives & works Sydney
Michele Barker works in the field of new media arts, exhibiting nationally and internationally. Her work addresses issues of perception, subjectivity, genetics and neuroscience.
Works include the CD-ROM, Præternatural, selected for exhibition in ‘Vidarte’, the Mexican Biennale of Electronic Art, 2002 and ‘Contact Zones’ a touring exhibition of CD-ROM art in 2001. The work is now in held in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University.
Barker’s present research involves multiple points of view for user-interaction using multi- channel projections and immersive environments. In 2004, she held an Artist-in Residency at Eyebeam New York. She developed a multi-channel work, Struck, which was awarded the acquisitive ‘Harries’ Digital Art Award in 2006. The work has been exhibited in Australia, the US and China. Barker’s research has been presented at major international conferences including ‘Future Bodies’, Cologne, ‘Vidarte’ Mexico and ‘New Constellations: Art and Science’. Barker is a lecturer at University of New South Wales, Australia.
Anna Munster
Born 1963 Sydney
Lives & works Sydney
Anna Munster is an artist, writer and educator. She collaborates with Michele Barker on new media and installation work and has exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in Japan, USA and Europe. She has published the book Materializing New Media (2006) on new media and art. Munster is a senior lecturer in the School of Art History and Theory, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia.
Exhibition catalogue