I'm Sorry for Your Loss
I’m Sorry for Your Loss is composed of gathered and reconstructed stories of personal loss. The stories are made visual with images already in circulation on social media platforms. The jpeg is today’s default image mode for capturing, distributing and archiving images via the internet. The jpeg is a compression/decompression codec - a complex algorithm that defines how an image is compressed for storage and transmission then decompressed for display.
Lost Breath, still image from video and sound loop
By incrementally decreasing the compression quality of the jpeg images in I’m Sorry for Your Loss, then layering the qualities to expose the difference in data, the infrastructure of the jpeg is exposed, visually aesthetizing the informational loss of data.
Just as these personal stories of loss have become anonymous through disassembly, reiteration, and reformation, the networked image becomes authorless and non-representational. At capture, the image refers to a specific time and place, but through distribution, the image endlessly circulates in a temporal-spatial void.
“The anonymous image no longer represents an absent object (as has been the meme for photography), but represents the absence of an object." (Hoelzl, Ingrid, and Rémi Marie. Softimage: towards a new theory of the digital image. Bristol: Intellect, 2015.)
Lost Seeds
Installation View, Ko Shing Gallery, Hong Kong 2017