Digital fictions imaging landscape identity and ideology

The friction between fact and official fiction appears to be a critical factor in all our lives. Bearing artistic witness to contemporary geo political life necessitates the utilisation of the technologies that are deployed at us, as a mirror to deflect and reflect upon the ideologically mediated strikes carried out against us. I have digitally manipulated documentary photography at the microscopic level and reworked the evidence in a manner that remains undetectable. The documentary information digitised the matrices of data as if at a genetic level, causing simulation of the real. This manipulation of the photographic document is seen to critique our contemporary condition where official fictions can now be represented as historic fact. This work challenges the integrity of vision and the nature of evidence by producing fictional documentation at a high resolution, which gives the illusion and authority of a photographic non-fictional representation. From within my studio-based research, what is and will be possible, how a history is recorded and represented, has been interrogated, by using one form of evidence — in this case, the photograph. Artistic works developed throughout the DCA examined the way a visual history is recorded and in this case, photographically represented. Appreciating the ideology of territory was seen as critical, particularly within an international agenda. Territory was established as a site for research. A territorial containment methodology was established. The territorial containment methodology was to simply designate a physical territory and then produce works from within this designated space. The containment methodology started with 18th century Botany Bay moved around to the next bay Little Bay and forward in time to 1969 and the contemporary artists the Christo’s wrapping of the space. Employing the same methodology the research moved into the Australian Western desert then off island to the Middle East. The collective outcomes of the research are represented by solo and group exhibitions and related publications, all of which are recorded within this document