ADDITIVE: The Lecture

ADDITIVE began serendipitously as Kathy was lecturing to her large photography class at the University of North Texas, and Lynné, her teaching assistant at the time, was listening attentively. From her front seat vantage point Lynné began snapping photos of Kathy each week with her cell phone and posting them to Instagram. After “liking” the photos, Kathy screen-grabbed and processed them via the app Glitché, and printed out sixty of them as vinyl banners. Mounted in colored frames, the glitchéd photos are signs that speak in multiple ways to the rapidly evolving definition of photography. Unstable images, scripted mistakes, repetition, automation, and versioning reflect the back and forth dialogue inherent in the classroom learning process, and simultaneously point to a 21st century liberation of photography from the historic perspective of monocular human vision. Consciously blurring the boundaries between traditional disciplines, these photo banner readymades invite viewers’ imaginative participation in our current post-internet collective image environment.

As the ADDITIVE collaboration evolved Lynné continued to experiment and created a series of silver gelatin prints, exposed in the darkroom enlarger directly from her cell phone, depicting greatly enlarged elements of her original photos. Closely cropped to draw attention to poignant details, such as hands and eyes, these new works exhibit the evident pixellation characteristic of digital images, and they remind us of Roland Barthes’ historic notion of the punctum.

Further collaboration led to creation of the installation ADDITIVE: The Lecture. Artist's wallpaper was designed from grids of Lynné's prints, and 10´´square banners from the original glitchéd vinyl banner series are randomly hung on top. The small colorful banners are framed with a variety of colored moldings that repeat colors in the prints themselves.