Free
Photo by Chase Barnes
Wilderness of Mirrors by Chase Barnes is a photographic survey of an emergent cybernetic landscape. The series visualizes contemporary mechanisms of control that employ technology, anxiety, and images as a means to destabilize and restructure belief. These discrete social and technological systems are embedded into the fabric of everyday life, and serve to reinforce and advance dominant structures of capital and power.
The series presents these conditions as a veritable wilderness– a landscape of images and devices that infinitely deflects, replicates, and distorts any information within its borders. These devices fuel a hyper-partisan fever and virulent strains of misinformation, all against a backdrop of psychographic advertising and domestic mass-surveillance.
By guiding the viewer through these absurd surfaces and circumstances, the images allude to the ways our perception is quietly directed and managed via algorithm to the benefit of corporate interests and intelligence organizations.
Ultimately, Wilderness of Mirrors aspires to locate the intersections of simulation, power, and concealment in order to disentangle the mesh of our personal, political and digital selves; it describes an urgent need to reclaim the agency we have lost to convenience and abstraction.
The work seeks to question default realities and reframe our relationship to this digital landscape, before it is completely determined for us.
