These images are all produced using a mobile phone (Tocco Lite) and are taken in the course of my everyday activities. I do not go looking for subject matter. The image manipulation is all done only on the phone itself and I make a point of deleting any image that does not start looking good after a few minutes. I also insist on deleting early versions of images so that the image making process is irreversibly one-way in its flow.

The image manipulation features of a Tocco Lite are not very precisely controllable, but they are recursive and so offer considerable flexibility, and so the eventual look and feel of any image produced is heavily dependent on serendipitous workings of these effects (including certain software bugs that unpredictably occur), as well as the equally serendipitous qualities present in the original images themselves.

I have been continuing the process of making these images as part of my daily life for long enough now that it has become something of a meditation practice for me. When looking at my environment these days I often perceive glimpses of possible other worlds that are suggested as well as inhabitants of these other worlds, and these inhabitants often express emotional qualities (in their colours, in their ambiguous Rorschach test like forms and in their quasi-facial expressions) that reflect tendencies in me that are present both consciously and unconsciously, and how these two categories overlap to create a feedback between my known and unknown self.

I have long been interested in the mysterious possibilities that can be channelled through the human subconscious and one of the most enjoyable aspects of showing the photoart I make to other people is discovering what the images suggest to them.

This type of art is something that anyone with even quite a cheap phone could make if they were sufficiently interested to invest their attention in it for a reasonable amount of time, and what I would hope for most would be that the portable electronic devices that are currently used by people (apart from to actually communicate of course) mainly as a means of consumption could become creative tools in the hands of a mass community of artists that could share their creative expressions with others in their physical vicinity. I would love to be able to make an image while out in public and think that others around me would understand what I was doing as they would be doing the same and we could show each other our art and learn something of each other’s inner worlds thereby.

Simon Very,

Preverb

Simon Very's art on the Web