Digital Me
By Jason Canavaggio
27 June 2008
This came about from several factors.
I've read dozens upon dozens of how to articles describing how to make a digital photo look exactly like a lomo style picture through photoshop. Ironic.
Japanese cinema.
The works of William Gibson distopia fiction provide great imagery. The line that stuck with me the most was from Neuromancer: "The Sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Originally someone else was supposed to pose for these; however, due to lack of willing people, I was forced to turn the project into a series of self portraits.
The main idea behind the look of the series was to imagine a person being transmogrified from their physical form into a digital form, hence the photographs varying between solid and dissolving. I also used as little emotion as possible in order to de-humanize myself and be more robotic. The use bright colors were inspired by films about technology and the world of tomorrow. After a few experiments in lighting and some innovative modifications, I decided not to do the pictures as grainy as I had originally intended, but instead keep a majority of them smooth to convey the surrealism.
