Computer sketch for "Self-Portrait on the Brink of Detection", 2009

Quantum Physics teaches us that there is no real continuity of objects around us. There are only quanta of experiences, little individual flashes of light that our brain automatically connects into familiar objects that then appear to us as constant. For this piece, I wanted to use the idea of a successive accumulation of events leading to the delayed recognition of a familiar shape. For this purpose, I wanted to decrease the rate of events to the point that there remain only enough events to have the image appear as a barely recognizable image. I wrote a computer program that transforms a photo, in this case of my face, into a distribution of spots. The more light a particular area of the photo was exposed to, the higher the density of random spots, or ‘events’, generated in this area. The piece is a free-standing backlit steel plate with 1,500 laser-pierced holes.