With the series ‘Flowers’ Jensen is exploring the rendering of analogue images into digital images in computers. The base images for the series are a collection of photographs taken in a small German village. The photos were taken on Kodachrome film, a slid-positive film that is now discontinued. What is so special about Kodachrome film is that the light that creates the image is exposed directly into the film and that the unexposed material is extracted in the process of developing the slide. It is as if the slide-film is taking a tiny slice of memory of reality with it in the shape of thin layers of colors.
The films have been scanned and thus digitalized and then again rendered into 3d models in an attempt to reconstruct the city landscape. To create the 3d models that the final ‘Flower’ images are made from, Jensen has been setting up some parameters that make the computer render the images with slight variations. These variations sometimes turn out very different from the original and thus give the result a ‘life’ of its own. Jensen is interested in this failed transition from a pure analogue medium to the digital sphere and the new alternative worlds that is created in this failed transition.
Flowers understood as the reproductive part of a plant are in a sense the core of this experiment. How will a new artificial nature within a digital rendered world look and most importantly, how will it re-generate itself and evolve? As our biological beings come under ever more pressure from increasing unhostile environment, we might need to find solutions to where to live our lives and exist. If the tendency will be an increasing time shared in the clouds of computational graphics and virtual worlds, how will this then look and how will we populate this space in coexistence with the digital?
The series ‘Flowers’ has been uploaded and tokenized to the Ethereum blockchain and then staged in the blockchain based virtual world Cryptovoxels making the circle complete. The material images of the real tangible German city have become distorted flowers with a life of their own in an intangible world.
The installation ‘Flowers’ can be seen by visiting Cryptovoxels from the middle of November 2020 following this link: https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play?coords=N@55E,263S , the parcel has been sponsored by the crypto art collector Tokenangles
The work will also be featured in the publication 'Into the clouds' by CICA museum press.
