Jesse Farber

Our culture produces a profoundly self-alienated subject. The material facts of our existence – our own organs, cells, and atoms – seem foreign to us, as if in an inaccessible parallel universe, ceaselessly enacting inscrutable processes with which we feel no connection. In microscopic photography and microphysical diagrams, we recognize the bizarre alien forms of our science fiction fantasies, a population of grotesque monsters and unfeeling automatons engaged in cryptic exchanges and transformations, demonstrating how paradoxically entangled our sense of the mysterious “In There” is with the unknown “Out There” of outer space and the supernatural. It all seems to be happening somewhere else, even though these are our own lives, seen at their most fundamental level. At this time in history, while biotechnicians busily apply algorithms to manipulate biogenetic forms and their functions, and nanoroboticists prepare machines which will engage directly with the living microscopic world, our deep self-estrangement carries growing implications.

Laurie Anderson once made this analogy, in her piece “Beginning French”: 

It's like sitting at the breakfast table, and it's early in the morning, and you’re sitting there eating cereal, and you’re not quite awake. Just sort of staring at the writing on the cereal box. And suddenly, for some reason, you snap to attention, and you realize that what you're eating is what you're reading. But by then it's much too late.

Working with a library of tiny, highly manipulated fragments, I stage indeterminable spaces that reflect on this self-alienation, building on the tension between their convincing photographic imagery and their unidentifiable subjects. By clearly signaling their artifice, in edge cuts and exaggerated halftone dots, these works also situate themselves within a cultural environment in which every artifact is endlessly modifiable, a temporary configuration ready to be remixed again — and refer to this same dynamic in our physical world, manipulated by our scientific technology.