Tarantula Authors And Arts' Inspiration for March

Exploring the field of “digital materiality” with Eva-Teréz Gölin

If I were to choose one word which I find essential for both my works and my practice, it would be materiality. The most obvious part of it is most probably the materiality of the printed images. However, these past few years I have been exploring the field of “digital materiality”, which in a way ought to be an impossibility given that the digital file does not exist in a physical condition.

My background as a professional image editor has given me a special relationship with and understanding of the digital image. When I shape and reshape, enhance or conceal the pixelation or other artefacts of the images, it is as though I can touch and turn them around. Somewhere between where my eyes focus on the screen, and my hands gesture to and fro with the cursor, the immaterial file takes on a physical state.

For me the digital processes, the cropping, and the editing, also serve another purpose; to untie the image from the notion of indexicality which limits the photographic image to concern itself with the past. I want to set the viewers’ minds free from this common understanding of what a photographic image has the possibility to depict. I try to represent a “now” which is not tied to the actual moment when the original photograph was exposed, but a “now” at the very moment in which the viewer looks at the image. As such, it also includes an image of what has not yet happened but a possible future.

- Eva-Teréz Gölin

Eva-Teréz Gölin