A good portrait, it is commonly believed, captures the rich, inner world of its subject.
While the history of portraiture is long and complex, one clear trend that has emerged is the ever-increasing democratization of the portrait itself. Once reserved for kings, queens, and the aristocracy; it was unthinkable that portraiture would be accessible to the general public. Now most people can create dozens of portraits instantly with their phone.
But where does the democratization of portraiture end? What will be the next group to gain access to portraiture?
Enter The Machine is a portrait studio for digital entities such as files, folders, programs, and systems that aims to provide a new way of seeing our digital files. One that does justice to their uniqueness, the diversity of the data they contain, and the complexity by which they are structured. To show their inner world.
The original Enter The Machine solo exhibition at Garis & Hahn in 2016 consisted of nine original 48” x 30” programmatically generated Duratrans prints in handmade light boxes. Each one contains a custom built electronic circuit that allows the light boxes to slowly pulse. The nine light boxes are listed below.
~/Desktop
~/Desktop consists of 218 distinct files from taken from the artist’s desktop totaling 1.4GB of data. The dataset contains mostly jpg and png files (orange/red), with occasional mov files (pink), zip files (white), and Microsoft Office files (green and blue).
~/Downloads
The artist’s downloads folder, ~/Downloads, consists mostly of open source programming libraries and frameworks, such as OpenFrameworks, which was used to create these works. These coding libraries normally consist of thousands of small text files, which is what forms the very clustered center. Also in the Downloads folder are various pdfs, images, movies, and zip files.
~/Library/
~/Library/
~/Music/
~/Music/
~/Dropbox
One’s Dropbox folder is often the digital equivalent of a biologically diverse ecosystem, teaming with digital diversity. ~/Dropbox, the artist’s Dropbox folder, contains 2.5GB of data spread over 7,152 files of over 100 different types.
~/Library/
~/Library/
/System/
Buried in the System folder of Mac OS X v10.10 is a folder called LinguisticData, which contains the files needed to translate the operating system into Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. /System/
~/
The artist works and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. ~/Work/
seancorriel.com
Previously working as a freelance web designer/developer, the artist created lots of websites for friends and family. seancorriel.com
Garis & Hahn Gallery
Enter The Machine was on display at Garis & Hahn in New York City from January 27th to April 17th, 2016.
The installation is accompanied by Digital Matter, a 15 minute looped single channel sound composition by Krista Dragomer. Each light box is handmade made by Chris Miano.
In May, 2024, the works in this series were renamed as follows:
- Enter The Machine 1.0: My Desktop → ~/Desktop
- Enter the Machine 1.1: Downloads (stock photos, bank statements, open source code libraries, etc) → ~/Downloads
- Enter The Machine 1.2: Three Months of Email → ~/Library/
Mail/ @imap.gmail.com/ Data - Enter the Machine 1.3: iTunes Compilations, A–E → ~/Music/
iTunes/ Music/ Compilations, A–E - Enter the Machine 1.4: Dropbox → ~/Dropbox
- Enter the Machine 1.5: All My Passwords → ~/Library/
Application Support/ 1Password 5/ Data - Enter the Machine 1.6: Mac OS X 10.10 Linguistic Data → /System/
Library/ LinguisticData - Enter the Machine 1.7: Work Done for the School of Visual Arts in 2015 → ~/
Work/ SVA/ 2015 - Enter the Machine 1.8: Websites I Created for Friends and Family, namely, lustforart.com, mattcorriel.com, reidblackman.com, seancorriel.com → seancorriel.com
, lustforart.com , mattcorriel.com , reidblackman.com
