Untitled Document

“Breadzone” is a computer animation developed from one of my digital painting of a stack of mouldy bread in the early stages of decay. It is my desire to delve further into an image that already evoke so many interesting visual associations let to the creation of a digital animation that allows the original subject to all but disappear.

The animation starts from a single point on the original image, randomly selected by the computer’s hard drive and then travels across the picture, zooming in and out from one level of intimacy to another, while the bread is continuously degrades 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 the “true” and the “false”, the “real” and the “imaginary” is where Breadzone continues to exist. This simulation disrupts any expectations of a single place, transforming a terrain into a realm of fantasy, ambiguity and temporal disjuncture.

The Breadzone animation tends to depict a landscape from a distance. The use of bread might evoke mountain-like forms, however, it is my engagement with the idea(s) of the landscape that I explore. As ‘Breadzone’ travels through the image it suggests more information about the image. Contrary to this suggestion, however, it gets harder to relate to the image as a whole as the programme zooms in and reveals more detail. From this point one can start to discover and reconsider the terms "inside(r)" or "outside(r)".

The use of mold (as in the molding of the bread) implies decay, a form of organic change caused by natural phenomena. This phenomenon is carried forward on a digital platform as ‘Breadzone’, the animation, continues the conceptual mutation of the bread. Parallel to the mutation of the bread, digital mutation of the ‘mold’ itself as pixels comes into existence as the programme peaks at ultimate abstractions in the color palate of the mold. It is no longer about the visual, but a list of data transmitted as a singular repeated digital language. 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. This is the final and foremost ‘in-between’ in Breadzone’s journey and this is exactly where I wish to embark on the rest of my journey as an artist to discover what this may mean.