Tristan Jones

Faitours Forge, 2021-22

Installation of 24 C-Type Kodak Metallic Prints on Dibond, Two Screen Projections, Audio, Lighting

Meta Masks, 23 x 33cm, C-Type, Kodak Metallic on Dibond [01-12]
Stage Avatar, 41 x 27cm, C-Type, Kodak Metallic on Dibond [13-16]
Stage Avatar, 13 x 20cm, C-Type, Kodak Metallic on Dibond [17-24]

Video Projection, 4’ 16”, Video Projection, 3’ 21”, (looped)

FORGE: To form by heating and hammering; to beat into shape.
FAITOUR: A person who deceives others.

I’m a London based mixed-discipline conceptual photographer, retoucher and digital artist. I probe personal and universal concepts such as identity and masquerade, social conventions and constructs, conforming and compliance, stigma and stereotyping.

Faitours Forge is a portrayal of the relationship between identity and masquerade, the interplay between always-on connectivity, intrusive technology and the platform. There is a powerful yet hypocritical duality of the platform’s questioning of self-worth and self-identification, whilst it duplicitously facilitates self-gratification, fulfilling the egotistical desire to be noticed, valued, praised, and adored. We, the participants, masked behind the platform, perform for the world to see. As individuals, we’re assimilated by technological osmosis - into this ever-expanding metaverse, where the core persona is shaped, formed and informed through environmental and technological feedback, as a cognitive process. This is where the meta-self is forged. A subset of personas distinct from those which we carry into the physical world. They are virtual, yet we value and defend them and their existence, to the core.

Water, Earth, Air, Fire - Mythological tropes employed to bring sense to the chaos of identity, repurposed and technologically reinterpreted through my masks, serve as metaphors for the physicality of device, our pseudo-cyborg state of being, the handing over of self-sufficiency to technology. The stage, a construct symbolising the opaque cloak of platforms, the technological-medium we now exist within.

@tristans_photos

www.tristan-jones.com

www.vimeo.com/tristansvideos

www.twitter.com/tristansphotos

Back

WATER:
Code, Binary, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Metaverse, Digitization, The Platforms, Avatars

EARTH:
Silicone, Copper, Graphene, Gold, Tin, Lead, Rare Earths, Circuit Boards, Microchips, Cables, Wires, Interconnects and Interfaces

AIR:
Internet, Wifi, Bluetooth, NFC, GSM, 2, 3, 4, 5G, Microwaves, Satellites

FIRE:
Electricity, Capacitance, Electrons, Batteries, Solar, Lasing(fibreoptic), LED’s, Screens/Displays, Physics, Quantum

WATER AVATAR 03, 2021

EARTH AVATAR 03, 2021

AIR AVATAR 03, 2021

FIRE AVATAR 03, 2021

space (40)

WATER AVATAR 02, 2021

EARTH AVATAR 02, 2021

AIR AVATAR 02, 2021

FIRE AVATAR 02, 2021

space (20)

Meta Mask Glitch, 2022

Video: Meta Masks Glitch. 3’ 21”

This is one of a complementary pair of short videos that I created as part of my installation.

The videos are projected side-by-side in the installation, audio from both videos complement eachother as they overlap and loop.

The footage is stop motion DSLR frames of the meta masks I made, as they hung within a home studio set.

As part of my experimentation and iteration of the series, I used long exposure to capture their movement, photographing the moving masks as they slowed and came to a rest.

This resulted in interesting series of stills that I then animated.

There are 25 individual sequences within this video, looped and reversed at differing speeds and durations, to create the overall effect.

Some are inverted as digital negatives, others are pushed further into the creative realm, processed using Lightroom only.