Protection Room, The Pentland Experiment Drawing

Visual Artist I Edinburgh I Digital Deconstructivist I The Pentland Experiment I The Dancing Plague of 1518 CO-RRUPTED is a collection of Harman’s digital images; images that he has deliberately corrupted, through a specially developed algorithm. From selfies on our phones to medical scans, digital images play an essential role in the way we communicate information. However, digital images are always subject to a range of corruptions such as blurriness, grainy noise, missing pixels, and colour misrepresentation. Harman has always been interested in this area of discordant interference, whether it is from an old flickering tv or irreverent brushstrokes on canvas. The beauty revealed by lost transmissions and corrupted imagery pushed Harman to develop an algorithm that deliberately corrupts digital files as directed. This algorithm is “trained” to recognize the ideal level of corruption required by Harman, by taking in a large amount of data and extrapolating the complex parameters that define the digital images he is creating — including variations in texture, color, light, shadows, and edges. As a result, this exhibition transmits the binary nature of Harman’s practice; both painting and digital. Within the deliberate misrepresentation, traits of venality and demoralisation are observed. Within the corruption, there is a breaking up of the information, which leaves the viewer to interpret the space between abstraction and figuration.