High Voltage Image Making by Phillip Stearns @pixelform

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Adafruit 2830
High Voltage Image Making by Phillip Stearns.

A project exploring the use of electrical discharge as a means of creating images in photographic media. High Voltage Image Making is a developing body of work that started with the Retinal Pigment Epithelium and Other Vision Technologies, Real or Otherwise Imagined and has grown to include Polaroid Type 55 @ 15KV. The project explores and extends the expressive capacity of instant photographic film technology beyond its ability to capture images of the world through the application of high voltage and various chemical agents. These treatments approach the film technology as a recording media, capable of creating images from physical, electrical, and chemical transformations. The project takes its cues from artists such as Man Ray (photogram), Pierre Cordier (chemigram), Marco Breuer (scratched expose and developed c-prints), Chris McCaw (sunburned prints) and Hiroshi Sugimoto (static discharges on photopaper).


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1 Comment

  1. I remember doing this sort of thing back in about 1980 when I was in school. A friend and I wanted to see if we could try Kirlian photography (we were young and it was the 80s, so forgive us). We persuaded one of our science teachers to let us do it, so we were given access to the school dark room, a stock of x-ray film that wasn’t being used and a Van de Graff generator. We managed to produce a few interesting prints but none as beautiful as these, although my gorilla palm was funny. If nothing else, we learnt a lot about making up solutions for developing and fixing film from scratch and experimenting with static electricity and how effective plastics are at allowing you to store large amounts of charge (ouch!!).

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