Details

On production, a piece of paper does not know its final printed form, it may become a coloring book or a lunch menu. In this case, these pages became part of a magazine for LifeWear, a lifestyle magazine by Uniqlo used to advertised their clothing.

On production, a roll of photographic film does not know how it will react to the light and produce the negatives it does, it may become a hiking viewpoint or a portrait of a friend. Here, it is a photo of a humpback whale from a whale watching tour I was on in Monterey Bay.

But even these finished states are just as fluid as their initial states. A page from LifeWear can continue its journey, from marketing content to a print medium for a photograph. The photos that were meant for editorial content is now texture and style for a new work of art.

Some of the journey could also be purely accidental. It's hard to see in the images here, but the photo of the whale is covered in a pattern of lines called reticulation. It happens when there is a mistake in the development process of the film, where the temperature change happens too quickly. Perhaps its a lesson in what happens when one outsources a part of the process, or it's an unexpected (and unwelcome) collaborator entering the journey of the art object. Ether way, it's now woven into the story of the item.

Now, it's arrived in its current form, as a GIF that I'm sharing here.