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‘Ontic Glow’ (2019-ongoing)

Lisa di Donato’s work is comparable to that of early photographer-explorers, who crossed continents to capture a visible world that would eventually change dramatically or disappear altogether. But Di Donato doesn’t have to leave her house and only photographs what she encounters on her computer screen. In ‘Ontic Glow’, she combines two very different technologies: the old wet plate process and 3D ground images from Google Earth.

She turns the algorithm-generated photographs that she collects during her ‘walks’ – as a digital tourist through surreal industrial estates and remote natural spaces – back into tangible material through collodion wet plates. The irregularities that this chemical process irrevocably brings about interact with the glitches and errors in the digital representation of the landscape. This work shows the distinction between the indexical photographic reproduction of reality and computer-generated images made without a literal reference.

‘Ontic Glow’ depicts traces of inhabitance, yet no human life, as if the future has already been colonised and abandoned, like a kind of naive nostalgia that no one really feels anymore.

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