Though this series is not complete by any means, it represents movement in a different direction than my usual fare. My photography has, for the past few years, been mostly analog – taking place almost entirely in darkrooms where I apply sandpaper and flames to my negatives until small holes begin to appear in the plastic or the negative warps enough so that it cracks in the enlarger.

The material here, though, is mostly digital. Some of the photographs have been taken on film and scanned into my computer, but the mode of destruction that these pictures undergo cannot be done without a computer program. For instance, I downloaded Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra from Project Gutenberg and combined the letters from the texts with bytes from my photographs. What better way to mutilate my pictures than through the “Philosopher with a hammer”? – especially with those books in which he is calling for people to salvage traditional morality for the construction of their own moral sense.

The material presented here serves as a point of entry for further exploration into the possibilities provided by programmatically combining the bytes of photographs and/or the characters in a text.

– Kyle Valade
for EDCP 305