The Hyperreal, If You Please
The ease with which Google (an internet search engine) enables us to access photographic material, and the cryptic fuzziness of search results, plunges us into a serendipitous space lacking any kind of context. The search results page, with its bland grid of suggestions, brings us unapologetically close to answers to questions like «how many photographs have ever been taken?»; «what would they like look like side by side, unsorted?», «how high would the mountain of photos be if they were all developed or printed onto paper?».
Indeed, context-free collections of unrelated pictures have become something of a micro-phenomena with websites such as ffffound.com and the similarly named as-found.net offering an addictive daily update of pictures torn from their source, and offered up without comment or judgement. Whereas fffound.com is more concerned with pronounced aesthetics, as-found.net considers itself to be a place of quiet, where pictures, with their inherent inner perfection, may be contemplated anew, without all the distraction of their original context. Of course, their new context is a framework in which an anti-aesthetic of imperfection might thrive. Vive le crap, so to say.
The picture above has been lurking on the desktop of my computer for months, doing nothing. I’ve had to create a new category for this posting: «hyperreal». It’s where SLAB would like to turn its attention slightly away from architectural siutations which are directly experienced, and take a look at spaces and structures caught somewhere between the real, the fictional and the downright daft.