The Life Death Oppositional

02 Scot Cotterell

The Life-death Oppositional is a series of 35 small photographic prints spread across a wall.
The images comprise the residue of two separate google image searches using the terms 'life' and 'death' as provocations.
Partly as a response to recent realist photography, but also to do with setting parameters within a system in order to facilitate the creation of art; a kind of improvisatory structure, I conducted the two searches and chose only images that were photographic and only images that appeared in someway posed or constructed.

The resulting files were then burned to cd and printed on Fuji crystal archive paper at a Harvey Norman self-serve digital photo-lab.
These parameters were set so as to gain a particular visual feel to the work as a whole while trying to avoid making aesthetic decisions about each single image.
The connection of photography to visual truth of an actual event is a core interest in this work.
The images used now exist beyond the camera that may have created them; they are searchable database items, files on a cd, and now digital prints. I have retained no record of their origin.

Does a keyword search of global information detritus tell us anything about anything?

Scot Cotterell is a hybrid-media artist, writer and curator working across the fields of performance, installation, audiovisual composition and still imagery. Scot has performed and presented work at numerous large-scale national festivals including Liquid Architecture and ElectroFringe, been published in Australian Art Collector, Un Magazine, and theprogram.net.au, and featured in independent film, theatre and television both in Australia and Europe. He has curated audiovisual performance and installation for Galleries and Theatres, and been broadcast on radio in Amsterdam, Japan and Australia. He lives in Hobart with his three children and is studying a BFA in Electronic Media and Art Theory.

address
Inflight Elizabeth Street
237 Elizabeth St, Hobart TAS 7000
artists
Scot Cotterell – Artist