Last weekend was the opening of Constant Dullaart’s solo exhibition titled Romantic Software Dialect. With a previous exhibition “on the changes that the digital age has brought about in the medium of photography” ((FOAM Photography – in reverse: 27 November 2009 – 21 February 2010)) in FOAM, Photography Museum Amsterdam, this is not his first expo where software aesthetics are caught on print. As such, on their Twitter account the Artpocalypse Collective refers to Constant Dullaart who is moving beyond the web and taking the online offline as a “post internet artist.” By manipulating images with Photoshop not only are the images’ content traces removed (which makes the spectator wonder wether the images were portraits, landscapes or war images?) and that what may be awful is now rendered completely serene.
In the exhibition ‘Romantic Software Dialect’, online alterations and user interface options collide. An ethical minefield so to say, because technological devolpments have no morals. As cookie-cuttered as it looks, ‘Healing’ (2010), renders this phenomenon. By using Adobe Photoshop manipulation effects, Dullaart covers or erases the horror of natural disasters. As a result they appear to be spherical and romantic dreamvisions, hiding any evidence of the deep-layered disaster they are supposed to show.
The (small) exhibition as part of the Artpocalypse Collective is on display in the middle of the Jordaan until the 24th of October.
http://discussphotography.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/constant-dullaart%E2%80%99s-romantic-software-dialect-opening-%C2%AB-anne-helmond/