SOCKS

An online magazine of Art, Architecture, Media, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology)

  • Media
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Culture
  • Sounds
  • Territories
  • Visual Atlas

Early Digital, Unintentional Collages: Fireflies by William Larson

February 23, 2017 by Mariabruna Fabrizi 2 Comments

William Larson is an American photographer who continuously experimented with different media in order to produce meaningful works and question the role of technology in the definition of an artistic language. His “Fireflies” series (1969–1978) deal with the possibility of introducing time and randomness into a photographic work, employing a cutting-edge technology for that time: the fax machine, namely: a Graphic Sciences DEX 1 Teleprinter.

The results are -partly- unintentional collages where texts and images are merged by the fax itself. Larson would feed the machine with pieces of paper, photographs and even sounds which could be visually translated by the fax. Glimpses of abstraction, surrealism and concrete poetry appear in this early conceptual exploration of digital technology.

I started to work and think of photography as a system of production, supporting a bias toward the additive possibilities of the medium, and less the subtractive, descriptive, or literal.William Larson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All images © William Larson

Related Posts

  • Oma/Rem Koolhaas early sketches

    A collection of less-known Office for Metropolitan Architecture sketches from 1980's and 1990's projects. Click…

  • Arabic Machines: Early Schematics

    Water powered systems, pulleys and gearing mechanisms, images from an arabic manuscript, datable from the…

  • Tsunehisa Kimura's Digital Apocalypse

    Tsunehisa Kimura (1928-2008) was a Japanese artist, specialized in photomontage. His works usually depict scenes…

  • Disintegrating Digital Images: Laura Charlton's Prints

    Laura Charlton is a Brooklyn-based artist who works with silkscreen prints and monoprints The abstraction…

  • Kugelhaus, by John William Ludowici

    John William Ludowici (1896 - 1983), inventor and engineer, invented the Ball House in the…

Comments

  1. DQ says

    August 30, 2017 at 12:04 pm

    Really, really like this.

Trackbacks

  1. Toolkit: Close Reading – Designing Methodologies says:
    January 7, 2018 at 11:23 am

    […] Image: William Larson […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr

Socks is a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination.

About | Visual Atlas | Topics

We are Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli from Microcities. Ask us anything

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr


SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Whenever possible we try to attribute content (images, videos, and quotes) to their creators and original sources. Please feel free to write us if you notice misattributions or wish something to be removed.
SOCKS is powered by WordPress.