I really enjoyed meeting Shingo Francis at the Art Center open studios. Upon entering his studio, I couldn't get a good read on his paintings, especially the large digital ones. I liked his collage of environmental disaster imagery: ideas that weigh heavily on all of us. And there was a screen displaying digital pixelation which I was not initially compelled by.
After speaking with him for a bit, he explained what the digital image was—snippet of surf cams from all over the world with feeds that were throttled in some way. The data-choking leads to bizarre pixelation and compression, where the visual feed tries to update itself, tries to correct the image, but never can catch up.
So what we are left with is an image of the environment trying to right itself. Constantly updating, it cannot overcome the digital bottleneck. Then the environmental devastation imagery pinned up next to it brings it into focus. The environment, the ocean in particular, is always trying to right itself, clean itself, but we won’t let it. The metaphor of digital garbage as real pollution is made very visible in his videos.
I was then transfixed by an acid green set of waves breaking in the foreground of a heavily compromised image, and it felt as appropriate as any piece of art I’ve seen.
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