JEREMIAH BARBER
projects
restoration effort
evolutionary variations
foraged smartphone tripods
how to grow a light meter
lightroom/darkroom
wilderness film studio
tree cranes
period (ATA)
beacon
other half orbit
performance (2004-2018)


exhibitions
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Lightroom and Darkroom

3D model environment with digital photocollage, drawing, and audiovisual
elements

2020Interactive. Best viewed on a browser or VR.
Inside these works (Lightroom: a greenhouse / laboratory / art studio, and Darkroom: a pigeon roost / photographic darkroom) are stories of attempts to expand the photographic process to collaborate with plants and nonhuman animals. Real historical examples are intermixed with the artist’s interventions, diagrams, and videos. Each room traces an alternative path of technology that is loose, wild, and ambulatory.

Lightroom includes an early version of the camera flash made from burning fern spores, a garden that tells time, and the artist’s efforts to build a lightmeter that relies on a plant’s reading of sunlight. Lightroom considers how precarious and adaptive systems might allow us to move forward together into our unstable future.

In Darkroom, pigeons rest in the nooks and shelves, reflecting several ways in which the birds have been collaborators as photographers, lifesavers, and data collectors. From Julius Neubronner’s nascent spycraft to Beatriz da Costa’s PigeonBlog (2006), pigeons are both an essential companion species, while also derided and weaponized. Darkroom explores the conflict inherent in biomimicry—elevating the traits of nonhuman animals while destroying their lives and habitats.

These works are imaginary spaces, dream studios built as 3D models with layers of digital animation, drawing, and video. Initially intended as an in-person exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, these works were made in response to the Covid pandemic and the need for artists to envision alternative realities and ways of experiencing art. They were on view as part of the exhibition “After Life: We Survive”, which included an in-person component in the windows of YBCA.