Dark Days
     

These photographs are a small excerpt of about 70 works which emerged from journeys to serveral cities in the Winter of '05/'06, among them New York, Prague, and Venice. The whole cycle is called "Dark Days - Venice, Prague, New York". Its topic is the isolation of the modern human beeing in today's big cities. The reality of the city inhabitants undergoes an estrangement by stylistic devices such as coarse grain, blur, camera shake, and multiple exposures. The selected templates/images show scenes of crossroads in New York. They were taken from a large distance at night. The humans shown in the photographs are not visible in the negatives with the naked eye. Only an extreme enlargement makes them visible. The technical process to generate these templates/images is a hybrid one. The photographs were taken on panchromatic film. The relevant sections of the negatives have been scanned with a high resolution (4000 ppi). After applying the usual image enhancement techniques, artifical grain is added to the templates/images to further exaggerate the effect of the film grain. Only after this are the templates/images scaled up to their final size. (Recently, they have been shown in an exhibition in the size of 80x80 cm.) It is important that the grain is added before the enlargement, because otherwise the pointilist effect, especially interesting from different viewing distances, is missed. Finally, a triplex filter with some yellowish and purple tones is applied to the black and white image for atmospheric reasons.

Digital art, first of all, has to be art. A work of art, either digital or not, has to express an artistic statement. Shining examples for artistic statements and a source of inspiration for "Dark Days" have been the Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti and the Russian filmmaker Andrej Tarkowskij. Giacometti has reduced the human body to its basic shapes, and thus appeals perfectly to the human visual (and thus aesthetic) system. Tarkowskij takes the view that a work of art should suggest something inexpressible. It can evoke a memory of a personal emotional incident, and has the intention to arouse an own spiritual state in the observer. By giving an account of a hopeless world, an artist can arouse the feeling of the opposite ideal. "Dark Days" tries its hand at this.


  
Gabriele Peters, born 1968, lives in Bochum, Germany and studied Mathematics and Psychology at Ruhr-University Bochum, and received her diploma in Mathematics in 1996. For her research on the perception of three-dimensional objects at the Institute for Neural Computation in Bochum, she received her Ph.D from the Faculty of Technology of the University Bielefeld in 2002. For five years, she has been working on image processing, computer graphics, and imformation visualization at the Graphical Systems Department of the University Dortmund, and is a project leader for learning object representations of applications in computer graphics and computer vision. During two stays as a guest professor in the Vision group at the California Intitute of Technology in 2004 and 2005, she took part in the development of new techniques for the generation of photo panoramas. For the last ten years, she has been active as an artistic photographer, as well. Her photographic and artistic education she received at the Center of Art and Music at Ruhr-University Bochum from 1996 to 2000. She has had the chance to present her works and projects in several group and single exhibitions; for example, in the Museum Bochum, the museum of arts of the city of Bochum.