Waste
Waste, a series of photographs, concerns itself with two notions of the “save” action, implementing a circular photographic process where an optical phenomenon is confronted with the user interface of a common tablet. Mittwoch used two paper weights made of transparent glass, objects which he placed on the surface of the tablet’s touch screen. Safeguarding nonexistent paper, the action echoes the “save” command on a symbolic level only, in fact subverting it.
The see-through paperweights are cubic, allowing ambient light to filter through to the surface of the touch screen below them, transmitting the ceiling in Mittwoch’s studio within the confines of their lower face; in turn, the image displayed on the screen from bellow is projected upward, to the upper face of the cubes. A camera captures this setting, feeding the image back to the tablet device, which shows it on its screen. Repeating the process, every consecutive capture shows a greater degree of fragmentation to an initially recognizable image.
Formal and chromatic in appearance, the images in the sequence are ever more disruptive to our visual orientation, progressively blurring the distinction between real space and screen space. The two notions of the “saving” action – as a user-generated command and in the actual, physical world – begin to clash and interlock, cementing the bond between the saving and agglomeration of visual data on the one hand, and the loss of orientation, functionality and meaning on the other.