Site-Specific Software Art
Pairs is an album made of pairs of photographs of the same scene shot at a few seconds of interval. The images are cropped randomly by a software the artist wrote for this project and only five percent of these high-resolution photographs are shown each time. Every viewing being different, it draws the attention of the viewer to a different detail of the same photograph.
The random framing allows to break away from the usual boundaries of the memory set by photography. By deliberately recording a moment with a camera, one associates a fixed image to the moment and usually sticks to it in a definite way. Marc Lee allows himself to rediscover some forgotten or unnoticed parts of his souvenirs. Thus, he re-opens the crystallization mechanism of memory and even creates a stimulus for the outside viewer, who is invited to associate with these “impressions” to rediscover other facets of his own memories.
Through this album, the artist suppresses the chosen aesthetic value given by contemporary society to photography by reclaiming and extending its function of aide-memoire. At the same time, he changes the power that images have on our minds by using them as partial sources of information, which allows a subjective reconstruction of a souvenir.
Text: Sophie Hamel
Example, 1 pair
