LOCKDOWN
ARCHIVE
MIKE MANDEL
CHANTAL ZAKARI
​
2018
WEBWALLS
(webaffairs)
​
2005
Companion pieces:
The imagery for this mural comes from the book webAffairs, sexual imagery drawn from internet webcam communities. With Mike Mandel's help I translated this imagery into architectural scale by creating a floor to ceiling ceramic tile mosaic mural. The wall is comprised of thousands of one inch tiles, an abstraction of colored squares close-up but a faithful representation of the original monitor pixels when viewed from fifteen to twenty feet away.
Electronic images are comprised of colored pixels. Beyond the continuous tone photograph, a digital image is made up of many squares of distinct colors. In this mural we are magnifying the scale of these colored squares to architectural proportions. When a viewer approaches a pixelated image wall twenty feet high, made of one inch tile, one becomes lost within the image as it disintegrates into an abstract pattern. From fifteen or twenty feet away the image coalesces into a facsimile of what one sees while looking into the monitor on the desktop. On the wall the pixels become solid, an object made of porcelain or glass that could last forever, while on the screen the video image is ephemeral comprised of continuously changing colors of light.
For me, the premise inherent in this work is the recognition that as we increasingly participate in a virtual environment the virtual assumes a more powerful position in identifying who we are. By creating a super-scale physical, and architectural environment for these images I enable the viewer to walk into an overarching physical space that refers to the compelling psychic space of the virtual. In this project I take the virtual room and make it a real place where one may walk into.