The Psychogeography Of The Right Thumb
The Psychogeography of The Right Thumb is the series that I am showing at RCA Show 2016. This series is about examining and interpreting one single image; it is the scan of my own right thumbprint. It’s showing you a privileged view of being in the photograph/scan/ bio-metric image (whatever you may call it) that represents me in many digital systems around the world.
The photographs raise more questions than present a resolved opinion or a fact. It makes you think about the identity, the authority, the surveillance, the consent, and the digital image. The word code works as a metaphor in the work, the image that is the representation of the human code is represented in a form of a man-made code to communicate with machines (hex code) in order to create another image that is the self-portrait of being in today’s time whether you understand the code or not.
Initially, the photographs that were created through the objective and logical approach towards the process of understanding that thumbprint, ended up as a very personal journey once realized that it is disclosing itself. The photographs show newly generated geological, or topographical landscapes that describe my internal space. It is a psychogeography of a personal data set. The exposing and encrypting aspects are equally important of me, within me. The realization that such a simple indexical way of making an image leaves one with a prodigious amount of habitat to work in just amazes me. This series of work is an attempt to give a glimpse of what we do not perceive.
ayesha saeed 