Dangerous Little Green Boxes

From Every Fragment Is a Total Fragment by Ari Kakkinen

Dangerous little Green Boxes are a kind of an introduction to the condition of the image in time of its technical indifference.

During the hanging of one of my shows in Helsinki, one of the Dangerous Little Green Boxes fell down from the wall. It was a dangerous and explosive instant. The accident, though, created (Communication) Breakdown. It was a true event, yet fulfilling some considerations of the theme of the damaged image and the impossibility of demolishing the appearance.

Technological disappearance of the image is close upon reached in the two-pixel works Skin I_I (1 x 2 pixels) and Autocurves. First I took an image with two persons where their skins were touching. Then I reduced it and scaled it down to the size of two pixels, showing only two monochromatic squares of a 1/300 inch.

When I with small steps was scaling up this tiny little picture to a larger scale, some extra/dis-information was accidentally included. This coincidence resulted in a soft edge where there should have been a razor sharp line between two color fields. Now there is no more restrictive sharp border between the two imprecise spaces, which, in its turn, makes exchange, sharing and communication possible.

With Autocurves technical dependency of photography goes even further. Using autocurves is normal when handling image data. It is the first step to see what the image should be along the algorithm. Most often it works very good.

Now, Skin I_I is put through autocurves. This time the end result is quite strange. Black and green of Autocurves shows how the computer sees human skin as it ”should be” when optimized and neutralized.