After the Index
Gregor MacGregor is an artist based in Boorloo (Perth) who works with photography and the computational images built from it to examine how the camera has shaped our view of the natural world. The work starts from natural history collections and the systems built to catalogue them.
The camera has never been a neutral instrument. In its early years it worked alongside the museum cabinet and the herbarium, sorting nature into things that could be labelled and stored. My practice starts from that history and uses it as material.
My interest in the constructed image began in London, building commercial photographs in camera from multiple exposures on transparency film. My recent work uses computational processes that follow the same principle. In photogrammetry a specimen is photographed many times from overlapping positions, and software assembles the photographs into a three-dimensional model. The model can be printed as an object or photographed again as a print. By the time it reaches the wall, the image is several steps removed from the thing it began with. Photogrammetry is a current tool. The same questions will apply to whatever replaces it.
Vilém Flusser called this kind of picture a technical image, one computed by an apparatus. Timothy Morton’s idea of the hyperobject, something too vast in time and space to hold in mind, gives me a way to approach climate change without photographing its symptoms. A meteorite or a museum specimen becomes a local surface standing in for a scale that cannot be seen whole.
The work borrows its forms from the museum. Prints are shown in typological grids, and each one enters the studio register with a code that is never reused. These systems promise more certainty than they can deliver. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that we perceive from inside the world, as part of it, and I treat the camera as one of the instruments through which that perceiving now happens. The gap between the label and the thing is where the work takes place.