MATAN MITTWOCH by Audrey Illouz

Matan Mittwoch explores modalities of recording and reproduction that can generate an image or an object. He has developed picture-taking apparatuses that are invisible to the viewer and make it possible to observe the "behavior" of a touch screen and control the process of image creation, from its genesis to its duplication. An exhibition of his work was held in the fall of 2016 at the untilthen gallery in the Paris suburb of Saint Ouen.

Machines facing one another are hooked together in a closed circuit. A mechanical, omniscient eye competes with the human eye in a machine-generated cognitive and perceptual -and sometimes kinetic-experiment. The installation Laterna Magika (2013) brought together image-processing technologies from different eras. A darkroom enlarger was reconfigured to serve as a slide projector. The projected image, however, was digital, produced through the recursive use of a screen grab of the Photoshop home page duplicated over and over until the image is as dense and black as if we were looking into a tunnel. What is addressed by the mise-en-abyme of the digital image converted into an analogue format and projected by an analogue device is the process of the generation of images itself. This image stratification was emblematic of this artist's later experiments using the surface of a touch screen.

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