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"Future Passed:
This is exactly the book that I wanted to make. But while I was still appreciating this bold idea, Regula Bochsler and Philipp Sarasin were already stepping to the plate. They simultaneously show our world in 'high re:solution' and 'dis:solution' (Bernd Stiegler). They didn't use their own camera in the process, but rather Apple's, the way Michael Wolf had also already used Google's street view cameras in order to find his 'unfortunate events.'
Bochsler and Sarasin use the 'fly over' function within Apple Maps, which delivers almost photo-realistic 3D rendering of many of the world's cities. But in contrast to Doug Rickard in A New American Picture, they weren't forced to follow the traces that the camera car had made; instead, they synthesized their own views from positions that were (almost) freely chosen. In fact, it would be more correct to call them 'hovering points,' because you can always only look down from above, freedom ends at 45°. You never make it down to street level, and the program deprives you of a horizon. The screwed up, sometimes schematic, melted, dented, shrunken, brutally misrepresented houses, bridges, trees, refineries, graves, ships and cars can be read as an allegory for the fatal belief in the technical distinguishability and controllability of the world.
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Andreas Trogisch: I work as graphic designer and photographer. I started making photographs more than 30 years ago, but started publishing books of my own works only in 2010. My last book with 140 black and white images came out this summer and is entitled Replies.
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But the fascinating and disturbing images have a surreal charm, an aesthetic attraction that originates from the implemented technology's imperfection. Although it belongs to the most advanced in existence, this technology is often surprisingly unable to recognize and correctly represent the most plausible things. This is a frightening thought when one considers that the process of generating 3D images from a series of aerial photos was originally developed for the Swedish arms manufacturer Saab and is also currently used militarily for example, to steer drones. The Rendering Eye shows the equivalent of the image that Google, Amazon and others have of us from automatically generated user profiles. I'm not sure if I should hope that we are only seeing the consumer version of a 'real thing,' which has long since been operating somewhere with lethal precision."—Andreas Trogisch
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| The Rendering Eye. Edited by Regula Bochsler & Philipp Sarasin. Edition Patrick Frey, 2014. |
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| The Rendering Eye. Edited by Regula Bochsler & Philipp Sarasin. Edition Patrick Frey, 2014. |
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| photo by Ute Mahler |
Andreas Trogisch: I work as graphic designer and photographer. I started making photographs more than 30 years ago, but started publishing books of my own works only in 2010. My last book with 140 black and white images came out this summer and is entitled Replies.
See more Book of the Week picks