Volume

Poweleit Niklas

All aboard the strangest train ride, on a journey into abstraction. The piece, made completely of Al-generated clips, descends from photorealistic representation into the bare essentials of the digital image. Breaking the frame and plunging deep into digital matter, the film explores computer-generated images from the inside, in one long fade into non-representational images. One way to think about this work is in the context of the Pictorialism movement. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen pushed back against the idea of the photograph as a document by employing techniques which played with the realism of the medium. “Volume”, similarly, reveals the abstract quality one can find in machine-generated imagery. Rather than try and replicate reality through digital tools, artist Niklas Poweleit proposes deconstructing images to their bare essentials.