Impermanence

“The visual result of the symbiosis between film matter and organic matter is the conceptual origin of this body of work.

The process involves the cultivation of emulsion consuming microbes on a visual environment created through portraits and a physical environment composed of developed film immersed in water. As the microbes consume light-sensitive chemical over the course of months, the silver halides destabilize, obfuscating the legibility of foreground, background, and scale. This creates an aesthetic of entangled creation and destruction that inevitably is ephemeral, and results in complete disintegration of the film so that it can only be delicately digitized before it is consumed.”

inspiration continues here

“I,  a.k.a.,  Tonio Oh,   work   and  live  in Seoul, where I  was  born and raised until  moving  to  New York  where  I studied   film   and   photography  at  Hunter College.  My work and practice stem from my interest and approach towards other disciplinary thoughts and ideas, from philosophy to sciences. My  most  recent  work,  exhibited  at Zaha  Museum,  was  inspired  by  the notion of the first advent of vision  in life  on  earth,  and  my  current  work focuses   on   implementing   microbial growth on film as  a  means  to  explore  the impermanence  of  matter  as  well  as the material limitations of photography.”