Two Anamorpohous

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Brian Reffen Smith

2000

Lithograph
31.5"x20"

Description

Two Anamorphoses makes the software interface visible, presenting distorted views of digital scenes rather than seamless images. Reffin Smith uses anamorphic transformation—historically associated with Renaissance experiments in perspective—to destabilize the supposedly objective space of computer modelling.

The distortions foreground a point he articulated repeatedly in “43 Dodgy Statements on Computer Art”: many of the “objects” of computer art are merely instances of an invisible process, and perhaps the waveform should remain “uncollapsed, the artwork staying undecideable, problematic, unobjectified.” By warping the screenshots into spherical and arched projections, he resists the closure of the image as a coherent, finished object. This result is less a demonstration of technical capability than a reflection on how digital representation refracts, rather than resolves, the status of things depicted through computational systems.