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Dark Matter
2019
This series seeks to question the materiality of digital photography, thereby challenging its very definition as the writing of light. This involves breaking free from the fundamental technical operations of the picture-taking process (framing, composition, focus adjustment and exposure settings) by minimizing the operator's intervention, reactivating at the same time the myth of the automatic genesis of the photographic image.
Here, this is the camera alone that creates the image, through an exposure triggered automatically when powered on, in complete darkness, and ending all by itself a few hours later once its battery depleted. Deprived of light information, the electronic sensor thus only records a residual random signal, generating a photograph entirely consisting of digital noise. Areas of it are then randomly selected using a computer program and automatically enlarged to the size and resolution of the original image. Freed from intentionality, the resulting photographs also suppress any reference to reality and its representation. Like electronic phosphenes, they reveal the iconic material specific to digital photography.
The title Dark Matter refers to cosmic dark matter as a humorous allegory of photographic ontology, which shares its characteristics : of a nature still unknown to this day despite the abundant literature produced on the subject.
