Description

In a series of paintings using a limited palette of sixteen shades of red, green, and blue, Troika explore how human vision is being calibrated to that of machines, specifically, to CCTV surveillance footage collected by environmental monitoring systems in the format of RAW digital images. Networked digital video cameras are routinely attached directly to trees in order to monitor illegal logging and detect early warnings of fire, rendering the cameras themselves vulnerable to flame.

‘Forest filled with Pines and Electronics’ captures one such moment of a wildfire that burned through the north of California in 2021, and imagines how the forest looked to the machine in its last moments of digital vision. With ironic reference to the poem by Richard Brautigan about the blissful co-habitation on planet earth by humans and technology, Programming harmony touching clear sky depicts a still from a CCTV recording of the burning Mojave Desert. In this series, the brute force of natural catastrophe is juxtaposed with the impassive view of the camera. As these images come into view of the human sensorium, they raise questions of witnessing, causality, and responsibility.