ANNA REED

Merging Dimensions

Chicago, Illinois • annaoreed.com

  • I grew up at the pivotal time of technological change. Landlines were replaced with cell phones, email replaced letters, inexpensive laptops replaced computer labs, and social media has since replaced everything else. Having lived with and without an online world I began to question the nebulous boundaries between these modalities and consider the points of intersection and overlap.

    Our media saturated world shapes how we see and project ourselves. I have felt the physical pain of staring into a screen, acknowledged the haunting specter of surveillance, and felt the fear and anxiety for a world I cannot see, hear, or touch. Simultaneously I have found respite in curated programs and felt comforting closeness of distant loved ones through computer

    generated light beams. Guy Debord wrote, “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” That the representation is in turn being directly lived. Online programs track and store our behavior and we become code and algorithms. Do we have a human future or have we become commodities as we project and consume our own images? Is our future

    already automated and curated for us? Do we have a choice in the formation we seek or do we live in our own echo chambers?

    It is from this uncertain place that I create work. I use my body as source imagery through lens based devices creating an intimate performance between human and the machine. Digital photographs, captured through low-tech devices, create intimate moments where technology and humanity converge. Vivid color and fragmented images both draw the viewer in and obscure information. They evoke emotions of connection, isolation, closeness, and vulnerability, prompting us to question which of our versions of self are complete.

  • Digital prints on paper, vinyl, and wood.