Project proposal

This project will examine the philosophically occult notion of becoming-animal, as developed in the work of French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus. They write about human-animal relations, specifically about man becoming animal or animal-like in contemporary culture. They emphasize the becoming, rather than the animal, which in turn also interests me, as whilst the man becomes animal, the animal becomes something else and disappears. Therefore it is not important, what kind of animal the man becomes, but it is the process of becoming that matters.

Eventually the outcome of the project should be a set of digital portraits displayed on LCD screens that are mounted on the wall. The use of digital technology is crucial as each portrait would be digitally edited so that the facial features of the sitter would start to resemble animal features. As the animal is not important, I plan to photograph each sitter from various angles and use details from different shots to combine the final portrait, so that the animal parts will actually be parts from the same person, only from different angles. The editing should be very fine, creating a new reality and eliminating the original portrait. To take the becoming even further, I want to program the portraits to change constantly. The change would be subtle, but big enough to be noticed. In this endless state of change the sitter will never be neither human nor animal, but always becoming.

The problem with the idea is that photographing a random person, the effect might get lost as there are limitless different appearances that humans can. So, if the viewer is not familiar with the original look of the sitter and the editing has been done very well, the effect of becoming animal might not come across. Ways around this might be either to photograph celebrities whose faces are familiar to many people or alternatively photograph myself. Photographing celebrities will bring in a myriad of new meanings and might not benefit the project, but I am willing to try nevertheless. Photographing myself, on the other hand, could introduce my personal angst of being tired of the big city – the ultimate outcome of modern society – and looking for a connection with nature, which ironically and contradictively will be achieved through the use of modern technologies.

Visually, I plan to use cold colours, nearly gray and desaturated tones to create the mood I have just described. The final image should be nearly painting like, so I plan to experiment with adding subtle textures either digitally or physically on top of the LCD screen. This could be further emphasized by framing the monitor.