installation view from Satellit Berlin 2011
Jarkko Räsänen: Ordered Dance, photographic series, 2009-
The photographs in the series Ordered Dance are collages that Jarkko Räsänen has created with self-made image editing software. The original images are diary-like snapshots of differing quality – cell phone images are included, as well as scanned medium format shots. Räsänen cuts the original image files into narrow slices and analyses the slices according to some structural parameter, such as brightness or the amount of red colour. The slices are re-ordered according to sets of rules (e.g. increasing brightness from left to right) to form a new permutation of the original digital image information. In images formed this way, the original representations of photographic subjects melt into abstract forms, and the material qualities get emphasised over the narrative content of the snapshots.
Räsänen’s working process is nearly performative in itself: he goes through thousands of snapshots from the hard drive to select the memorable moments, but then obsessively cuts them into slices and re-orders them tens of times before finally finding a new form for the images. By presenting multiple versions of the same digital image information in a gallery space, the prints question the authenticity of a digital photograph. Multiple copies of the same image in the same exhibition in different sizes and formats bring the focus paradoxically back to the missing "body" of the photograph: what is a photograph?
Jarkko Räsänen is visual artist using primarily lens based media and sound. He has studied photography, video and sound art in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and in the Berlin University of the Arts between 2005-2011. His work is dealing with human perception through spatial composition of the work, and on the other hand problematizing the realistic connotations related to mediated images.
www.jarkkorasanen.com
www.jarkkorasanen.com
