Reasons why I am interested in fragmentation;

i) Fragmentation - The breaking of images is a decision made by the Fragmentor. Deciding how the fragments separate themselves, what parts of whole detach to form their own node. Adding or removing a fragment from its original context is a decision. It’s a political decision.

ii) Authority – I am interested in fragmentation because it is important to understand that a piece, when separated from its whole, is an act of both knowing and unknowing. What connects this fragment to a larger context? Non-information and counter-information. The authority of the fragment is both understated and overstated, it can provide a full narrative shift or it can provide nothing but background noise. It is the viewers interpretation of the fragment which drives that.

iii) Abstraction – I am interested in the fragment because its logic, its constant shifting, its flux, leads to abstraction. To me, fragmentation is a response – through form – to the question – “how can abstraction be understood today?” How can abstraction, through fragmentation, engage me in today’s world, time and reality? Fragments, in their abstracted disjunction build a new form, opening towards a dynamic and desire of truth. The political thinking is the belief in form, and the aesthetic of fragmentation.

iv) Facelessness – I am interested in fragmentation because it stands for the time of both disparity and interconnectivity that we see in the world. Each fragment has the potential to be connected to and have an effect on any number of other fragments with which it shares a context.

v) Pushed to the edges – Fragmentation has the ability to take information from the centre and push it to the edge. The inverse is also true. It obliges to look and search elsewhere, away from the centre focus to find information or indication of what have been decentred and concealed.

vi) Aesthetics – I am interested in the fragment because it is a powerful aesthetic. The aesthetic power comes from the opposition between beauty of the whole and the non-systematic logic of fragmentation.

vii) The Betweens – I am interested in fragmentation because of the spaces omitted by the act of decetralising the form. The gaps left by the act of fragmenting a form. The gaps of interpretation lie between that which is visible. IT leaves space for the formless.

viii) Hypocrisy – I am interested in fragmentation because it reveals the hypocrisy of the one using it. I don’t accept fragmentation in my place ‘to show me’, when the one fragmenting claims the opposite, and is in face protecting himself ?

ix) Authenticity – the fragment, represents its own truth. In combination with other fragments it has the potential to tell multiple narratives. We digest information and learn in the same way. Something fragmented seems more authentic and is accepted as such. It therefore seems clear that fragments stand for authentication: authentication through authority.

March 2022

After Thomas Hirschhorn's “9 POINTS TO CLARIFY MY INTEREST IN PIXELATION AND WHY I AM INTERESTED IN WORKING WITH PIXELS." (2017)