Constant Dullaart – Jennifer-in-Paradise / Silicon Silicate

Constant Dullaart's work explores contemporary modes of access, visibility and (mis)representation associated with the global spread of information and communication technologies.

Dullaart responds to ideas regarding online transparency, hidden information and the multi-tiered infrastructure of the web and the different translations between man and machine.

The wallpaper ‘Jennifer-in-Paradise Liquify Creative Suite 6 /Scheveningen’ reworks a now infamous a low-resolution print of a woman on a beach. Originally taken in 1988 by John Knoll, the co-creator of Photoshop, this photograph shows his girlfriend in Bora Bora, French Polynesia. The first image to be used to demonstrate the capabilities of Photoshop and distributed to the program’s initial trial users to explore and test the software. The
image became ubiquitous for a brief period in which digital images were rare, repeatedly manipulated, and became the first Photoshop meme. Never widely distributed through the web, the image was not to be found online until Dullaart’s restoration of it, after which the artist wrote a public letter to Jennifer Knoll, the protagonist in the image. ‘Jennifer in Paradise’,
explores the Internet’s opacity, while highlighting the extent to which onscreen data are manipulated and controlled, enhanced or deformed.

Dullaart also looks into the dynamics of reality as perceived through the transparent computer screen. In ‘Silicon Silicate’ he uses glass as a transparent viewing metaphor (file windows, the screen’s glass, the Internet as a window to the world) by posing questions about the filtering
of information via the web services like Google or Facebook, and its potential to obscure rather than to reveal meaning. The downloaded YouTube video shows the making of Intel computer chips on a monitor covered by a glass plate with manually brilliant cut engraving of the silicon molecule.

Dullaart’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Frieze, Art-papers, Dismagazine, Monopol, Rhizome, TAZ and Texte zur Kunst, shown internationally at venues such as the New Museum, MassMoca and UMoca in the US, Rencontres d’Arles, Autocenter Berlin, the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie and works and lives in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Constant Dullaart’s work will be on display as part of the exhibition ‘the fluidity aspect’, which runs from the 25th of September until the 5th of October. Find more information about the exhibition here.