BREADZONE/ November Paynter / ‘Contemporary’ art magazine / Annual 06

When an artwork manages to radically alter and mystify one’s perception of an image so ordinary as a loaf of bread, it deserves further contemplation.

Breadzone is Goktan’s most recent production and one that marks a point of departure in her practice. Previously her works presented more literal references to mortality, survival and the base requirements of life. Breadzone has been developed from one of these earlier works, a painting of a stack of molding bread in the early stages of decay. Goktan’s desire to delve further into an image that was already suggesting so many interesting visual associations lead to the creation of a digital animation that allows the original subject to all but disappear in upon itself. The animation starts from a single point on the original image, randomly selected by the computer’s hard drive. It is the hard drive’s eye, so to speak, that then travels across the picture, zooming in and out from one level of intimacy to another, while all the time the bread is slowly degrading into an unidentifiable mass.

The actual, original overview of the bread is almost impossible to identify in either of the two projections that make up Breadzone. Because the relayed data never follows the same route, or starts out from the same place, shown on opposite sides of the exhibition space the projectors simultaneously screen different areas of the image and at different proximities. The texture of the bread blends and merges in colour and form to depict a terrain both familiar and oblique. What was once a real micro-environment launches into an intangible mass of camouflage that could be understood as a vast landscape. Pulled back to the intimate level, it hints at military costume and warfare. But, although references to the corporeal remain, a narrative tale of geographical dislocation exists in Breadzone’s new media application, which, by occupying both time and space results in a more ambiguous proposition.

As a digitally rendered simulation, the path of the work is taken out of the artist’s and viewers’ hands and the difference between what is true or false, real or imaginary is where Breadzone continues to exist. It is no longer about the visual, but a list of data transmitted as a singular repeated digital language. And as the bread goes on decaying to produce new forms, in addition a whole series of new pictures are consistently being produced with each frame that the hardrive creates. Occasionally even the hardware’s capability to read the image malfunctions and the programme temporarily crashes. At this, the work’s most sublime moment, the usual sweeping curves made by the endlessly shifting pixels compact into a series of straight lines and for just a moment a perfect minimal painting is all that remains.