Reformation
by Joaquin Palting
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Nature, Environment and Perspectives
My project, Reformation, is an exercise in understanding the nature of why philosopher Vilem Flusser referred to photographs as "significant surfaces." In his thought-provoking book, 'Towards a Philosophy of Photography,' Flusser describes photographs as objects that "...signify - mainly - something 'out there' in space and time that they make comprehensible to us as abstractions (as reductions of the four dimensions of space and time to the two surface dimensions."
In Reformation, I repeatedly constructed temporary sculptures, which I experienced in the 4 dimensions of space and time described by Flusser, and then photographed them to exhibit as two-dimensional photographic surfaces. This Sisyphean task, of sorts, allowed me to better understand the representational nature of the photographic medium by demonstrating how photographs limit our perception of reality by forcing us to engage with them in very specific and limited ways.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023