Artifacts

Artifact, in post-production jargon, is the element of a digital image that resulted from incompetent processing: a mark of "poor craftsmanship" or evidence of human tampering, depending on the context. I spent a couple of years digitally restoring 16mm television footage from archival collections. Much of this work involves repairing the physical scars of film editing: splice marks, dust, discoloration, mold, and damaged frames. The most demanding task is the so-called “repainting of cuts” - reconstructing missing or damaged image data using interpolation algorithms that generate new frames based on neighboring ones. Occasionally, a wrong reference frame would send the algorithm astray, producing strange, unintended images. Often grotesque, sometimes unexpectedly beautiful. Over time, I began to provoke these errors deliberately, pushing the software beyond its intended use. As my curiosity grew, my methods became more and more cruel and the artifacts obtained more and more dear to me: monstrous exhibits in a growing collection of screenshots, incomprehensible to anyone but me.