SVACE: Could you tell us about the art you’re exhibiting at AAF?

LD: The artworks I am presenting at the AAF are the most recent images from my ongoing series Ontic Glow, in which I render landscapes and architecture collected in the mass media program Google Earth as tintypes, a form of mass media in the 19th-century. The irregularities inherent in the photograph's physical chemistry interact with the accidents found in the digital digestion and projection of space. These images raise and blur the distinction between the indexical photographic reproduction of reality and its generation of pictures. As if the future had already been colonized and abandoned, the spaces depicted contain only traces of inhabitance, questioning our human relationship to this thoroughly unhuman world.

A sparer, stiller quality mark the latest Ontic Glow photographs compared to previous works in the series. They are dominated less by the wonderment of the hyperbolic spaces than a disquiet about what this surrogate world is for, the powerful tools that make it and usurp the world that already exists.

SVACE: Does this work represent your art practice? That is, how does it fit into the big picture of your work?

LD: My photographic practice is process-driven, full of translations and movements between the manual or analogue and the digital. This labor is generally invisible; its evidence can be seen in the sensibility I render things: spaces and places that are no longer, nor have they become something else, yet.

Ontic Glow images undergo so many manual and technological transformations. From the initial apprehension of the world by automatic cameras to the translation from images legible to humans into ones read by machines and eventual display in the Google Earth program, to my taking them from the screen and reinserting them into the physical reality as material images. The tintypes are images of volatile places made from innumerable images reified as single unique photographs. However, the series is particular in that it describes both my artistic methods and a machine’s ongoing process of deconstruction and reconstruction.

SVACE: Could you describe your experience with SVA? What did you gain from your time with SVA?

LD: Classroom time at SVA’s Continuing Education department has always been an expansive experience, whether in-person or online. The sheer diversity of people you encounter, their work, their reasons for being there is just fantastic because you find a way forward together and open each other’s minds to something wholly unanticipated and enriching. I’ve been a regular in classrooms because the ideas offered never felt as if they terminated at the end of six or twelve weeks; that time was only just the beginning of a new level of thinking and making.

The artist revives historical photo techniques for AAF 2021