Jennifer Kirk
Jennifer Kirk's preoccupation is with the everyday artefacts that order and control our lives without us scarcely being aware of it. Her project is to picture the promise of technology, and to make plain how we are all reliant upon thousands of digital technologies whilst scarcely registering the fact, let alone being aware of how they function or are produced. As she remarks, "from the digital alarm clock we switch off first thing in the morning to the last kettle of water boiled at night, we are reliant on microchip technologies without having any understanding of how they are created or how they function." Despite their ubiquity in our houses and offices, Kirk's subject matter is rendered unfamiliar. That her images are akin to landscape photographs, and feel like places rather than objects, is of signal importance. Her use of long-exposure macro-photography illuminates the microscopic landscape of the printed circuit board and the LED. The super-saturated colours of Kirk's prints reflect their long exposures, where digital cameras have been overwhelmed by information on settings they were never designed for. The effect is to create coloured mandalas or haloes echoing her view that "technology has become the new religion" – a conceptual space in which we can invest our identities, and a kind of belief system in which our insensate faith is placed. Using macro-lens to alter our sense of scale fundamentally makes strange these miniaturised, machine-made spaces. Kirk pictures what she calls the "technology landscape" from "the inside", from within the computer, the clock, the kettle maybe – for we cannot tell – itself. We become like Gulliver, a Lilliputian figure confronted with towering gargantuan objects. This process forces us to look at each individual component, its texture, form and function, as well as place within the whole, rather than at an entire printed circuit board or LED as a finished, manufactured object. Like Gulliver, in Kirk's work, we find everything "alien or foreign" as she describes, even when we know things should seem familiar. As she also notes, she has not chosen to examine the more esoteric, or high-end artefacts of the technological landscape: quite the contrary. Her purpose, in photographing standard consumer items, is precisely to resignify the most "universally recognised symbol of microchip technology" – the printed circuit board. In doing this, she asks how technology provides symbolic functions in our culture, and what symbolic functions it has taken over from other areas of thought.
