Mike Wong: Elevation #2
Artist(s):
Title:
- Elevation #2
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2007
Size:
- 13.5 meters x 0.5 meters
Category:
Artist Statement:
Elevation #2 aims to de-familiarize and extend photography in an alternative digital imagemaking process, inspired by the everyday cognitive process of assembling and organizing visual fragments into a complete mental picture of an object or space. The experience of traveling inside old elevators has always fascinated the artist because the metal gate functions as a window onto a space that is otherwise closed, invisible, and encapsulated. We rely on the elevator trip to understand this closed space, so we develop a complete image of it in our minds on the basis of piecewise information. Elevation #2 serves as a visual equivalent of the elevator experience, while it aims to extend the limits of regular fixed-point-of-view photography without sacrificing the simplicity and elegance of the art form.
Technical Information:
The digital image-making process used in Elevation #2 is analogous to object scanning but far simpler. A digital video camera recorded the whole elevator trip, and then image fragments were extracted digitally from video frames as elements for constructing the final image. The resulting
images offer numerous elements unseen in traditional photography. One interesting example is that the picture looks orthographic in one dimension but presents regular perspective in another dimension.
