Tramas
Photography and digital media
2009
About
Tramas was a project developed with Luís Dourado, commissioned by Nilo Casares for Outonarte'09.
In Tramas, craft traditions are joined together with contemporary technology, in a creative process that's more complex than it looks like. At first sight, the pictures look like they have been digitally generated or retouched, but they are actually the result of a public space intervention based on digital devices and photography.
Looking to re-appropriate aesthetic signs from the Galician traditional embroidery patterns ('encaixe'), the purpose of Tramas is to portray the sometimes difficult relationship between past, hand-made culture, with the machine-dominated present. For this, the artists conceived an electronic LED-based device, controlled by custom software in order to ephemerally generate these decorative patterns. These are only visible as flickering lights in long-exposure photographs; the human eye cannot discern these shapes by itself, and thus only the photographic process makes these images visible.
The artists scoured downtown Corunha looking for the most appropriate places to generate, somewhat magically, the performance that weaves these shapes into a visible form. Through buildings, fountains, city squares and parks, this work came to being in the shape of photographic vinyls which were placed on the storefronts of Casa Barros, a traditional store in the center of Corunha.
(from the Outonarte'09 catalogue)
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Visit the Tramas website for more on this project.
