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Repro.

photo-robot 2

Repro.

photo-robot 1

Taking one of the many techniques of digital visualization available to contemporary artists as a tool and context for the critical reflection upon social relationships and individual positions, the workshop was dedicated to a creative exploration of the formal and conceptual aspects of identity, the various ways of its representation and instrumentalisation. It was realized in July 2009 at the summer art school in Sremski Karlovci, Vojvodina, organized by University of the Arts in Belgrade.

The outset of the workshop were two photo-robots I made by selecting and morphing the three portraits of participants at the other summer art school workshops. Knowing the method and the group of people, but not which particular sitters I worked with, the Photo-Robot participants’ task was to individually choose one photo-robot and to emulate it using their imaging and detective skills, perceptiveness and intuition.

The visual credibility and personal expressions of the resulting virtual portraits simultaneously provide the space to play out and to reflect upon the material, political and ideological processes of production, manipulation, representation, consumption and evaluation of identities.

Combining the artistic research, lectures and film screenings, the objective of the workshop was to go beyond the conventional thematization of identity, and to provide a platform for practical and theoretical consideration of the complexity of art practice, its correlation with cultural policies, and its dependence on economic trends. Photo-Robot was devised from the 2D MutantZombies workshop.

Text

Miodrag Šuvaković: Digital Micro-Ecologies of Portrait

Documentation

Workshop: Sremski Karlovci 2009

Installation: Belgrade, DKSG Gallery 2011

Lectures

Eva Kamerer: Gender Identity from an Evolutionary Point of View

Dejan Grba: Bastards of the Cool (Photo-Robot)

Dejan Grba: Who? (Identity in Film)

References

Sir Francis Galton, experiments in composite imaging

Nancy Burson, a pioneer of digital morphing

Examples of early analogue and digital video morphing

Daniel Lee, digitalna simulacija morfovanja

The Identity Project, Wellcome Collection, London

Artists

Nemanja Nikolić, Jovana Mirković, Nataša Stojanović, Miloš Miletić

Liudmila Kartoshkina, Nikola Đorđević, Tamara Jeremić

Jovana Momčilović, Danai Iliopoulou

Works
Repro.

Installation in DKSG Gallery Belgrade, 2011.