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“I love you(r artworks).”
I love you.
No, you don’t. You love my artworks.
Yes, I do.
No, you don’t.
Yes, I do!
No, you don’t!
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You love me.
No, I don’t. I love your artworks.
Yes, you do.
No, I don’t.
Yes, you do!
No, I don’t!
Steven Schkolne
touch 4 by Steven Schkolne
http://schkolne.com
Moments of life shown in Steven Schkolne’s works are decisively ambiguous. They are the intermediate actions of strangers, providing no clue of meanings they carry. Just when you think you are looking at photographic works, the computer generated traces lead you to another mode of ambiguity. The characters look very real but artificial at the same time, all rendered by Spidermesh, an image-editing software developed by Schkolne himself. In conducting a research for a curatorial programme that I’m taking, I was lucky to have an email dialogue with this artist who brings (his own) technology into his works.
LHS: The works showcased in your website share a consistency in technical and aesthetic qualities. It would be nice if you could tell about the initiative in creating these works, thoughts about the particular graphic execution, intention, if any, of how the audience would perceive your works, and any important (or unimportant) aspects of them.
SS: Recently I’ve been working with images of people performing cosplay in public, dressing up like characters from anime and videogames [see http://schkolne.com/photoLA.pdf]. To summarize this series, I’d say it’s about examining a continuum, a gradation between point A and point B. By “point A” I mean the projected image of oneself. Point A is how one wants to appear to other people. I photographed people dressed as characters, trying to look like characters from anime, and I made them more anime, taking them further towards this projected, external self (point A). Point B is the opposite, the internal self. To represent this, I show more of the biological details of people, the parts of themselves that they cannot change - their internal self, the part that cannot be costumed, or the part of someone that you see underneath the costume. In these anime images, I take a photo and make from it several images, some towards point A and others towards point B. And in the websites, you can actually see animated transitions from point A to point B.
LHS: For this new series, there are versions as your usual Spidermesh style, while they are juxtaposed with or when zoomed, a version (of “point B”) that appears photographs. Is the latter altered original photographs or rendered with Spidermesh still? As they resemble photographs rather than rendered images (e.g. the closest view of http://gothlolimaids2008.com). The same question to fractions such as the pixelated hands of distance 5. This is a technical aspect that I would know about.
SS: Yes these are traditional digital photographs. In the anime images they are just straight photographs, and aren’t at all taken into Spidermesh. In the distance series, Spidermesh is used - the pixelated part is put in as one of the layers in Spidermesh. I have some tools in Spidermesh that allow me to pull pixels from a digital photograph in a variety of ways and pull it into the composition.
LHS: First view of your works give a (photo)realistic impression, though it comes with the paradox of simplification and abstraction of reality. Do you consider your works photorealistic in nature? Or are there certain references/influences for your artistic development?
SS: I don’t have much to say about photorealism. I saw it in an art history book when I was growing up and some people, like you, have mentioned it to me recently, because there is a visual similarity. So I looked at a bunch of those pictures, Ralph Goings and Richard Estes and those people, and that work really doesn’t make any sense to me, it doesn’t resonate with me. It seems they are trying to be as loyal to the photograph as possible, with paint, but hiding the impact of the hand. Maybe I am the opposite - I am trying to go away from the photograph, to distort the photograph in a way that reflects the hand. I think my visual rendering is more influenced by a painterly way of making images, perhaps Edward Hopper is a good example. There is this crispness of light, in the touch and distance series, that is painterly.
In terms of influences, a while ago I was very into Thomas Demand and Julian Opie, the way they distort the world, the way they re-present the world in this fictional sense had a strong impact on me a few years ago when I first saw their stuff. Also I always like the way Jeff Wall has this implication of narrative, but I kinda like that feeling but to have actually an absence of narrative, a kind of Jeff Wall feeling but without any way of seeing what could be going on. These days I am thinking a lot about some of Roni Horn’s serial photos - the one where she photographs the same subject over and again, presenting dozens of images that are barely distinguishable. And also Rineke Dijkstra, when she photographs the same person but at different points in their life. But I am probably more influenced by videogames than all of these artists put together.
…also I was very influenced by studying wavelets, subdivision surfaces, and other kinds of multiresolution representations. Spidermesh allows me to make adaptive-resolution worlds, where the amount of detail varies across the image surface. This is exactly what wavelet representations do well, but they do it in an orderly mathematically optimal way, whereas in my images I do it based on a hierarchy of meaning in the photograph that I determine.
LHS: It could be seen that Spidermesh allows the execution of depicting ambiguity. Please share a little of how you came up with the idea of Spidermesh for creating this type of artworks.
SS: I started on working on Spidermesh at a time when I was looking to expand my work, what I had been doing didn’t mean enough to me, and I wanted to engage more with reality. For me social space is a difficult place, Spidermesh was a way of distorting reality, to mirror how I feel to be in the world, and also it makes things look synthetic. Now for me “synthetic” is a kind of loaded word, a word I use a lot, so much that it has a very personal meaning to me. Synthetic is the space of videogames, it is being in computers, without a body. It is also the world of psychedelic drugs, where you see the distortions of your psyche, how your mind distorts things. It is also the world you see in books, when you imagine things as you are reading them, you can kind of only see so much detail. Certain things aren’t there. And for me the outside world is often at a distance in this way, things are not quite resolved. The people around me are abstractions, shells, they are surfaces and I wonder - do these surfaces have an inside? So for me, the Spidermesh visual language, as I was developing it, was a way to work with this sensibility, and also work with the real world and things that I see, in my work.
LHS: As research for curatorial practice, I would like to know how you feel about your works being reinterpreted in an exhibition setting. The topic we are studying is the Gaze (the term and concept as discussed in philosophy and cultural theories), take it as example. I’m particularly interested in your work distance 4 where there are three small groups of spectators, and the different directions they are looking at and out of the picture simply create wonderment. These spectators would bring out certain perceptions of the Gaze, and the ambiguity and discrepancy between reality and rendered world of your work would add layers of thought. Please comment on such a positioning of your work. Also by tackling the Gaze, voyeurism is involved. While the inspectors in your works act as viewers, they are also viewed by the audience, who may also be viewed by the others. Though there is an extent of voyeuristic nature in photography, e.g. in street snaps for your creations, I’d like to hear your comment on the role of voyeurism in your works, for you may not consider it so.
SS: Your insight is consistent with my understanding of the images. In all the distance pictures, I was very conscious when I made them that in these images there is no eye contact. I am pretty familiar with discussion of the Gaze, this seems to fit in somewhere there. In the touch images the face is always obstructed, this absent/disconnected gaze gives me feelings of displacement, coldness, objectification…interpersonal distance.
You are not the first to mention voyeurism… it’s funny to me that it comes up, people have been photographing strangers for a century, but when I do it, it is voyeuristic! The effect is partially because I’m shooting from far away with a long lens. Also this is due to the people being unaware of me. It always feels like I am using people, taking advantage somehow…
Besides answers to the above questions, Schkolne shared his artist statement about his works, allowing us to get better knowledge of the mind behind them:
The images are of unexpected events, seized mid-action, photographed in public space and overdrawn with a digital structure. Traditionally, photographs depict representative moments - a single image informs us as to the nature of events preceding and following the moment of image capture. The presented images depart from the classical photographic model in that the postures are not clear representations of a certain kind of happening. They are indeterminate configurations of bodies in public space which admit multiple interpretations.
For example, in touch 4, we see a girl and a woman. The woman’s right hand is holding the girl’s face, and her left hand is raised in the air. In this image, indeterminacy is produced both by the selection of the moment, and by the rendering technique. Is the left hand raised to strike the child, or tousle her hair? Is the right hand performing a loving gesture, or is it merely steadying the head of the girl so as to improve the accuracy of the strike? This image, like many of the touch images, hovers between violence and play.
Further indeterminacy is created by the digital simplification of the faces. The digital overpainting reduces surface detail and greatly simplifies the structure of the eyes. In cartoons, videogames, and comics, facial features are greatly simplified. The digital overpainting in touch 4 pushes the photographic verisimilitude of the source image toward abstraction. The textured gaze of the classic photographic portrait has been overpainted with the simplified face of the cartoon character. The girl’s expression hovers, it is unclear exactly what she is feeling. This lack of facial clarity complements the lack of clarity in the posture. In touch 4 we see a photogaph of an indeterminate event made further indeterminate by digitization.
In distance 5, we see three people standing together. The leftmost figure points at the ground, the central figure points towards the stomach of the figure on the right, whose hands are folded. It is unclear why these people are acting this way. Are the folded hands of the female figure a symbol of togetherness, or are they intended to push off the other characters? The happening that is imaged does not leave clues as to the moments preceding it in time. There is no clear consequence of the scenario depicted. The photograph has a symbolic structure upon which various meanings can be overlaid. These postures yield possibile interpretations but no clear conclusions.
The visual rendering of distance 5 spans the full spectrum of resolution - from the colorfields in the background, to the pixelated hands. This discrepancy in visual detail simulates the optical process of pulling something into focus. As the eye moves from background, to body, to face, to hand, it sees increasing detail. The photographic details are evidence which fail to lead the viewer to a conclusion. These images depict a world in which purposefulness abounds, but the true purpose of a person’s self-presentation is indeterminate (or, at least, not obtainable through vision). The nature of the seen subject, as encountered in public space, is unresolvable.
