DIGITAL CABINETS
The inspiration for this series has been the cabinets of curiosities of the 17th century, upon which today’s infotainment environment is modeled. Back then, the Cabinets’ purpose was not only about promoting knowledge, but also about power and the pleasure of ownership. Ownership in turn was used as social currency with which one could exercise power or superiority in the then society.
With the advent of digital media, the paradigms of ownership and function over digital assets has shifted. Nowadays, we are all creators and collectors of our own curiosities. Apart from that context of societal discourse, my purpose with this series has a mining-the-archive purpose. I explore and celebrate personal histories, memory and autobiography, experimentation, the establishment of new vocabularies of visual phenomena and their dissemination across digital media tools. These cabinets are generated-through-graphic-software composited illustrations, based on digital photographs, from my personal archives. The possibilities of these tampered, remastered and re-authored digital objects are truly endless.