WINNER: Kenneth Lambert
SEEME + CHASHAMA PROUDLY PRESENT
THE GRAND PRIZE WINNER OF
ONE SELF:
KENNETH LAMBERT
Kenneth Lambert is a conceptually driven artist whose practice investigates the human psyche through the lens of technology. His practice extends across digital media and installation. Lambert approaches his experimental art practice with the deliberation of a scientist and philosopher combined. His intention is to entice the viewer into a state that is self-reflective.
"I am interested in conveying the human spirit in the contemporary lense of technology. We have created a whole that is so interconnected, information-rich yet our anxiety levels have increased dramatically. I want to create a pause that is self-reflective, a meditative deep breathe that connects us to our humanity."
Data Blue is the result of a series of intimate filmed interviews conducted by Lambert whilst completing a residency in the icy winter lands of central Finland. The subjects are a collection of writers, academics, artists, and an astronomer who originate from the Antipodes, Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. Through a series of technical processes Lambert converts the sound and image from these interviews to data, the final outcome, a series of abstracted video and post photographic works.
In Kenneth Lambert’s Data Blue, portraits of his fellow residents are captured by a process of digital cartography. Soft blue light shines onto the subjects, lighting the textural spaces of their face, inviting them to share their desires and secrets while peering into their own psyche through the confessional anonymity of data collection.
These repetitive mapped moments look deep into the personal details of each subject and offer to Lambert and his camera a digital portrait, reflecting the subject back through layers of technology. Here, this digital cartography takes the form of volumetric data, plotted along an invisible axis and swirled into a dot-to-dot puzzle, where the viewers are asked to do their own processing. Data Blue is laced with allusions to data anonymization - by joining the dots, a point cloud emerges to reveal a complex portrait that speaks to the concept of privacy.
Lambert’s captured data portraits represent points plotted on a graph, the in-between allowing the viewer to paint their own picture amongst the visualised hard data. Like the flickering of an image on a cinema screen, these still images and videos are given form only in our minds-eye, as our brain is purpose built for filling in the blanks of visual data. Artificial Intelligence processes are only now looking to approximate the human mind’s guess working abilities with Google’s Deep Mind neural network dreaming up digital hallucinatory associations devoid of meaning. There is an unknowing innocence and looming terror around AI’s inability to extrapolate inferences. AI algorithms also supercharge surveillance and threaten our privacy, yet we voluntarily navigate within this new technological context.
These fractalized data portraits, both interpolate and abstract the figure in a similar manner that data in the cloud of the internet tracks us. Our own daily data trail drifts along behind us as we search the internet, painting its own incomplete portrait of each of us into the mirror world of the web. A world of likes, discarded shopping carts, web searches and that millisecond of lingering on a photo - these are all registered by the machine. A machine we have built. The web and the cloud is our own man-machine converter and we, collectively and willingly use it billions of times a day to travel into the internet. Like-wise our GPS wanderings are registered via our aggregate route from home, to school, to work, to the market, to the spot where we pause to contemplate the growth of a root in the sidewalk or our detour down a side street to catch a glimpse of sunlight striking a particular building before the sun dips below the horizon.
With an immeasurable amount of personal and sensitive data constantly being collected, stored and shared - the notion of anonymity is not guaranteed. Lambert offers these portraits as almost an inverse form of ‘light therapy’, adding insight and accessibility to the complex language of digital data sets. Data Blue investigates the way we peer into deep recesses of the mind and the data structures of the internet, finding intricacies and complexities in our willingness to disclose personal data.
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We are honored to present Kenneth Lambert,
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