The Witness

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Image activated by augmented reality, where 3D animated subjects and scenarios are integrated into a physical photograph. Inspired by the work of Carl Jung, the image is part of a larger series that explores themes such as identity, introspection and transformation. Through AR, game elements were introduced into the piece, offering virtual content unlockable through interactions.

Bio

Camila Magrane is a Venezuelan-American visual artist known for her augmented reality images, integrating 3D animated scenes and subjects into physical photographs. With experience in video game development and a passion for analog photography, she explores the dialogue between the virtual and physical worlds. Magrane’s images are inspired by surrealist compositions and reference the graphic hyperrealism of contemporary video game design.

but does it float
The Montreal-based artist has been working in the arcane reaches of analog photography for over 14 years. Through obsessive experimentation, she has developed a method entirely her own, combining additive colour theory and what she calls “a really bastardized version of Ansel Adam’s zone system.” Eaton’s relentless inventiveness and exacting practice have made her one of the most successful Canadian artist-photographers working today. She’s represented by galleries in Montreal, LA, and New York, where she exhibits her work by turns on a bi-annual basis. Viewers and collectors are drawn to the unique tensions in Eaton’s work: the austere minimalism coupled with her daring colors; the hyper-abstraction undercut by a current of playfulness; the defiant impenetrability softened by an aura of warmth.

ジェシカ·イートン
杰西卡·伊顿
polytopes
Jessica Eaton’s photographs dissect chemical and optical phenomena, the materiality of film, and the language of light itself. Eaton came to international acclaim through her Cubes for Albers and LeWitt (commonly referred to by the acronym cfaal)—a series of vibrant photographs that deconstruct her studio practice. Like the majority of Eaton’s works, these optically charged images are made by taking multiple in-camera exposures of common studio supplies. Through her abundant use of traditional analog photography practices—such as colour-separation filtering and in-camera masking—Eaton imbues her large-format images with an aesthetic more reminiscent of the paintings and drawings of hard-edge geometric abstraction than the photographs of traditional studio work.

Craco

Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia’s answer to Brooklyn’s High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town, “Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”