Artist Statement
Inspired by the way musicians employ modular synthesizers to generate layered sounds. DiGauss gives the user the ability to explore an image’s frequency space by layering an isolated range of frequencies, selecting from them, and recomposing the filtered output.
Initially based on the ideas regarding abstraction discussed in Rudolf Arnheim’s book “Visual Thinking”. Rudolf proposes the question "At what point does an image become an abstract representation of the thing it once was and at what point is it no longer perceived to represent that initial perception or representation." I liked this question especially in the framework of how it relates to children and their brains development from a young age. I remember as a young child laying in bed at night. Before drifting into sleep, on the wall, was a small quilt constructed with geometric patchwork of patterns and shapes. I would lay in bed and trace my eyes around those shapes trying to find patterns that weren’t immediately evident. I believe the simple visual game I played as a child created a tendency for my brain to gravitate towards geometric shapes trying to find structure where structure might not evidently exist. These two ideas have played heavily in my exploration of photography and the visual world.
Based on these thoughts I began to explore and manipulate images using Photoshop and Premiere Pro in much the same way an electronic musician explores and manipulates sound with a synthesizer and its modular components. Light and sound are both waves and at a fundamental level, the equipment, tools, and mathematics that have been created to capture, analyze and manipulate these waves are very similar if not the same. Inspired by this idea, I decided to see how I could use photoshop and its filters to reduce a still image into its component parts. Creating multiple plates with isolated image data. I then used photoshop to combine those plates and run them through another set of filters in order to extract different kinds of information.
An electronic musician can manipulate or create new sound using a synthesizer and its modular components and filters like LFO, High-pass, Low-pass, Envelope Generator and Gain. The access they have to the manipulation of these components has been kept on the surface and most often requires the musician to choose how they want to link the different components together. Photoshop is a lot like a synthesizer in many ways, it has High-pass and Low-pass filters, but it was not built to work like a synthesizer. Many of these manipulations are hard to get at, requiring many steps, and once achieved are permanent.
I’ve since become impassioned to build a web-based application using Chromium’s platform. Allowing an image to be responsively manipulated and for the applications inspiration to draw from synthesizers typically used to manipulate sound and make music.
