Jason Salavon is an American artist that works with a custom computer software to re-evaluate and re-configure various data and mediums into another form. Salavon collects pre-existing images and overlays and "averages" them to create "visualamalgamations." He also recomposes statistical data into visual images.
From an aesthetic stand point, it's hard to identify that his artwork is software-based. It looks very much like photography manipulation or even paintings. However, the software aspect is much more appealing on a conceptual level - finding an average or mean of images seems sort of ridiculous. Collecting images and creating a mega image that takes components of each culminates in an interesting dialogue of how similar things and people can be, and how popular culture moves (or doesn't) in time.
The following 4 images are from yearbook photos collected from Salavon's history. The first two are from the Class of 1988 and the second two are from the Class of 1967. The images are the end results of inputting all the images for a yearbook from a particular year into Salavon's custom software that applies an averaging process.
The four images below follow a similar process of averaging the Playboy centerfolds from each decade (60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's from left to right). In fact, at one point, Salavon's website was in a higher position than Playboy's own website in a Google search for "Playboy."
[His custom computer software is written in C on Unix-based SGI's using Paul Haeberli's SGI file format.]
So cool! It reminds me to the work of the french photographer Arthur Batut. Around 1880 he produced a series of portraits using the multiple exposure (multiple portraits of different people) onto one plate. With this, he seek to reach a sort of "type portrait" of a family, town, and even race... you might be interested, since it relates to your final project.
ReplyDeleteThese works are really beautiful. I'm glad to know about this innovative process as well! The formal aesthetic qualities kind of remind me of smoke drawings by a printmaker and painter Diane Victor: [http://www.art.co.za/dianevictor/] her work is remarkable, and similar in its kind of ethereal quality.
ReplyDelete--also: love the concept of social/cultural commentary using coding/software, how can we use technology as tools to help us understand our past and current evolution as a society? As individuals?
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