The light box displays a negative. It is a photograph of my hands taken nine years before I was born. It has been digitised and decomposed into individual frequencies, corresponding to the ripples of intensity across the surface of the image. This spectrum is rendered as a pair of oil paintings, with frequency increasing from the center (constant intensity) to a maximum on the boundary. The left-hand painting depicts the magnitude of each frequency and the right, its shift in phase. The projection is a reconstruction of this painted frequency data, back into an image by a “painting recognition” apparatus.
In a process analogous to the human error associated with manually painting an image spectrum, genetic inheritance, with its element of unpredictable variation and mutation, determines our nature and appearance but preserves certain traits that offer succour in a changing world.
Each of us is a node in a standing wave that stretches back across the generations, changing hands.