LCD Copper Plate II Photograph

The colourfully abstract LCD copperplates I & II (2012) appear like chemical battlefields, but are in fact similar ‘negatives,’ only much bigger. Borinski chemically activated this metal, in a way similar to how photo pioneer Nicéphore Nièpce experimented with copperplates for his very first registrations. Whereas Nièpce required eight hours of bright sunlight to obtain a heliographic image, Borinski exposed her prepared plates to a slide projector for nearly three weeks. The unstable, extremely slow chemical process keeps on reacting, mocking all preconceptions of photography as a snapshot. Borinski’s work is radical in the sense that she tries to locate the roots (‘radix’ in Latin) of a medium. Inspired by Foucault’s concepts of genealogy and archaeology, over the last decade a reaction to the simplicifications of dominant media theories has been formulated from different positions, under the umbrella term of ‘media archaeology.’ One of the most authoritative and idiosyncratic voices in this lively discussion is Borinski’s teacher at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Siegfried Zielinski. The artist studied there at the time when Zielinski just had fully developed the key notions for his book ‘Deep Time of the Media – towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means.’ One of the recurring mottos from his explicitly anti-progressivist resistance to the dominant ideology of digital standardization reads like this: “Cultivating dramaturgies of difference is an effective remedy against the increasing ergonomization of the technical media worlds that is taking place under the banner of ostensible linear progress.” Cultivating differences, keeping her media in a state that is open and transformable, is precisely what Borinkski does with her deliberately heterogenic oeuvre.

Photography:Metal on Other

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:43.3 W x 31.5 H x 0.2 D in

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