lightroom-darkroom — Jeremiah Barber

Lightroom and Darkroom
3D model environment with digital photocollage, drawing, and audiovisual elements
2020

Interactive. 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.

Created during the Covid pandemic, these works are imaginary spaces, dream studios built as 3D models with layers of digital animation, drawing, and video.