I scan therefore I am

Alex Supartono ,  Contributor ,  Seminyak, Bali   |  Sun, 06/29/2008 10:56 AM  |  Arts & Design

Anti Pregnancy: (Courtesy of Happy Scan)

Can a scanner make you happy? What kind of happiness can be produced by the act of scanning an object?

Decorated bottles, broken toys, a banana, screws, toilet paper, a rotten apple, used packs of contraceptive pills and candies -- they appear as photographic-like images that appear to have been captured using a camera.

Printed big, between 60x60 centimeters and 241x120 centimeters and mounted on neon sign boxes, the images are illuminated from behind. At second glance, one would notice something strange about these photographic-like representations.

The two-meter-high decorated bottle, for example, is focused from the top to the bottom. This is unusual as the bottle occupies the whole frame. The view cannot be achieved by a camera lens, which focuses on one point and makes the rest of the image less sharp.

So they are not camera-produced images. They are images that are captured through the "optical work" of a scanner, a flatbed scanner to be exact. With a scanner you are able to have the entire surface of an object focused as long as it has been adhered firmly to the glass surface.

But can an image produced by a scanner be considered a photographic work?

If we understand a photograph to be a moment frozen in time, portraying anything as it appeared within the view of the camera at that moment, then we only need to change the word "camera" with "scanner".

Snake: (Courtesy of Happy Scan)

Loosely speaking, the end results from both devices don't have obvious differences. So why do we bother? On the other hand, putting a camera-produced image and a scanner-produced image in the same basket just doesn't feel right either.

Angki Purbandono is the man who has provoked controversy over the subject, played out in his exhibition "Happy Scan" at Galeri Biasa, Seminyak, in Bali, from June 19 to July 14, 2008.

Despite his formal training as a photographer at the Indonesia Art Institute in Yogyakarta, Angki has practically stopped using a camera as his artistic medium. But he couldn't quite leave photography behind.

Instead Angki followed and tried to contextualize another photography tradition that used existing images instead of a camera. The work of German Dadaist Hannahand and American feminist Barbara Kruger has inspired his own photo collage works.

In his "Anonymous" series, Angki worked from photographs he found in flea markets -- a continuation of the work of artist/photographers in the sixties who dealt with the inseparability of popular memory, history and photographic images. We are reminded of the German photographer Gerhard Richter, who used newspaper photos to show the dialogue between private memory and public history, between family albums and social documents.

Scanned, printed big, mounted in neon boxes and hung on gallery walls, Angki's "Anonymous" series was the first attempt in Indonesia to show the ways in which art has approached the archived photograph.

The Dog Rolls The Tissue: (Courtesy of Happy Scan)

Responses from the public were quite controversial, with people questioning the notion of authorship as he had collected photos rather than taking them.

On the other hand, the art market responded positively. They welcome Angki's creative approach towards old photographs as a metamorphosis of the daily practice of photography to the realm of art.

After the "Anonymous" series, Angki started to use the scanner as his main medium of artistic expression, as it manifested in the title of his ongoing exhibition -- "Happy Scan".

He uses a scanner, instead of a camera, to produce photographic images for the purpose of art.

But a scanner can also be used to convey a symbolic message through art, as Angki's "Anti-pregnant" series shows. This work stands out because of Angki's ability to look at all parts of a contraceptive pill and detect its particular details: its metallic color, and the holes in leftover, unused pills. Their brightness is striking, the message is clear.

British philosopher and theorist Roger Scruton in his Aesthetic Understanding (1984) wrote: "If one finds a photograph beautiful, it is because one finds something beautiful in its subject. A painting may be beautiful, on the other hand, even when it represents an ugly thing."

Scruton's articulate, but flawed, argument didn't consider creative and technical choices in the transformation of the three-dimensional world to the two-dimensional surface of photographic representation.

Enslaved by the close relationship between a photo and its subject matter, Scruton couldn't see the possibility that a photographer could intervene with the subject matter, with its object, in order to create "beautiful" images.

Angki's "Happy Scan" does this. By using a scanner, Angki was left with very basic technical choices. His artistic possibilities then absolutely depended on the object that was to be scanned. How he looks at and finds the artistic side of a particular object. In most cases, he combined two or more inartistic objects and developed them into artistic ones.

Here Angki describes his excitement in finding objects and transforming them into a two-dimensional reality using a scanner. When it works, he is happy.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.