out of memory
My engagement with digital photographic methods began in the 1980s, at a point when the medium was technically emergent and aesthetically unresolved.
The images produced by early digital cameras were limited to a mere 2MB of storage, defined by low resolution, pronounced artefacts, and a failure to meet the optical fidelity one might expect from a photographic apparatus. Yet, these very limitations intrigued me.
What drew me was less the image quality and more the systemic properties of the process itself: minimal chemical load, negligible water usage, and a workflow that reduced material impact to little more than electrical energy. Long before digital tools became pervasive, I experimented with alternative image-processing pathways, pre-Photoshop, in search of visual outcomes that balanced the medium’s constraints with perceptual plausibility. A prelude to what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst later termed “ephemeral media memory.”
The title Out of Memory originates in the recurrent error message of those early systems — a signal of technological inadequacy, but also a conceptual prompt. Memory, whether biological or computational, is fallible, partial, and subject to degradation. This series explores that parallel: images as imperfect recall, mediated through hardware and human cognition alike. In this sense, the work operates as both a critique of technological aspiration and a meditation on the mechanics of memory itself — on how information is stored, corrupted, retrieved, and inevitably transformed.
The images produced by early digital cameras were limited to a mere 2MB of storage, defined by low resolution, pronounced artefacts, and a failure to meet the optical fidelity one might expect from a photographic apparatus. Yet, these very limitations intrigued me.
What drew me was less the image quality and more the systemic properties of the process itself: minimal chemical load, negligible water usage, and a workflow that reduced material impact to little more than electrical energy. Long before digital tools became pervasive, I experimented with alternative image-processing pathways, pre-Photoshop, in search of visual outcomes that balanced the medium’s constraints with perceptual plausibility. A prelude to what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst later termed “ephemeral media memory.”
The title Out of Memory originates in the recurrent error message of those early systems — a signal of technological inadequacy, but also a conceptual prompt. Memory, whether biological or computational, is fallible, partial, and subject to degradation. This series explores that parallel: images as imperfect recall, mediated through hardware and human cognition alike. In this sense, the work operates as both a critique of technological aspiration and a meditation on the mechanics of memory itself — on how information is stored, corrupted, retrieved, and inevitably transformed.
