This work was originally inspired by the collaboration between Gerhard Richter and composer Steve Reich's “Patterns”. In this particular work, the painter's image is continually deconstructed until it reaches a state of the sublime. In a similar manner after creating and translating a series of interviews into data fields, I set about to create a sequence of further deconstruction and spatial abstraction. By utilising a series of digital cameras in space and imbuing the environment with a sense of speed I arrived at this point. Data points accelerated moving in micro space expanded into vistas of colour volumes.

Liminal beings are those that cannot easily be placed into a single category of existence. Liminal beings are naturally ambiguous, challenging the cultural networks of social classification. The work evolution of data-based personas which been further abstracted into soft light colour fields. The movement and colour echoing what they once were, now dissolved into amorphous fields of colour and light.

In anthropology, liminality, meaning "a threshold" is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, in which completing the rite establishes.

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Liminal Beings 01

Liminal Beings 02

Despite our good intentions we reduce biodiversity through land management and impact the natural world in immeasurable ways. Over a four week period, in sometimes minus twenty-degree temperatures, I wrapped trees with hazard tape. What began as a meditative exercise whilst on a residency in Finland evolved into a comment on the accelerated effect human activities have on our environment. There is a numbing sense of apathy in the age of the Anthropocene towards solving climate change. I believe it will prove itself to be the most pressing issue of our generation.

* No trees were harmed during the making of this installation. Filmed during Artist Residency, Arteles Creative Center, Haukijärvi Finland.

Forest Meditation

'Incandescent Bloom' reflects on the impact of the increasing carbon emissions on the environment. The sequence begins with 100 particles emitted per second and concludes with over 360,000 particles per second in a 60-minute time frame. The volume is comparative to the amount of carbon we have been putting into the atmosphere since the industrial age.

Incandescent Bloom

Essay: Soft light, hard data.
Written by: Melissa Burnet Rice

The in- between time of the “blue moment” echoes across the snow and ice covered ground. Indirect diffused light tints the sky blue, with fewer than four hours of daylight glimpsed during the depths of winter in Finland. In higher latitudes, this “blue moment” can last hours and is the period that separates day from a deep, never-ending night. Winter months crystalize into these in-between times where residents and visitors incubate indoors while the landscape is frozen in the gloaming.

In our everyday, sunlight reaches Earth’s prismatic atmosphere and is scattered directionless by gases and particles in the air. Blue light scatters more than other colours as it travels in shorter, smaller waves - this relative diffusion of shorter wavelengths paints the Finnish winter landscape and Lambert’s nine subjects in an eerie glow.

In Kenneth Lambert’s Data Blue, portraits of his fellow residents are captured by a process of digital cartography. Soft blue light shines onto the subjects, lighting the textural spaces of their face, inviting them to share their desires and secrets while peering into their own psyche through the confessional anonymity of data collection.

These repetitive mapped moments look deep into the personal details of each subject and offer to Lambert and his camera a digital portrait, reflecting the subject back through layers of technology. Here, this digital cartography takes the form of volumetric data, plotted along an invisible axis and swirled into a dot-to-dot puzzle, where the viewers are asked to do their own processing. Data Blue is laced with allusions to data anonymization - by joining the dots, a point cloud emerges to reveal a complex portrait that speaks to the concept of privacy.

Lambert’s captured data portraits represent points plotted on a graph, the in-between allowing the viewer to paint their own picture amongst the visualised hard data. Like the flickering of an image on a cinema screen, these still images and videos are given form only in our minds-eye, as our brain is purpose built for filling in the blanks of visual data. Artificial Intelligence processes are only now looking to approximate the human mind’s guess working abilities with Google’s Deep Mind neural network dreaming up digital hallucinatory associations devoid of meaning. There is an unknowing innocence and looming terror around AI’s inability to extrapolate inferences. AI algorithms also supercharge surveillance and threaten our privacy, yet we voluntarily navigate within this new technological context.

These fractalised data portraits, both interpolate and abstract the figure in a similar manner that data in the cloud of the internet tracks us. Our own daily data trail drifts along behind us as we search the internet, painting its own incomplete portrait of each of us into the mirror world of the web. A world of likes, discarded shopping carts, web searches and that millisecond of lingering on a photo - these are all registered by the machine. A machine we have built. The web and the cloud is our own man-machine converter and we, collectively and willingly use it billions of times a day to travel into the internet. Like-wise our GPS wanderings are registered via our aggregate route from home, to school, to work, to the market, to the spot where we pause to contemplate the growth of a root in the sidewalk, or our detour down a side street to catch a glimpse of sunlight striking a particular building before the sun dips below the horizon.

With an immeasurable amount of personal and sensitive data constantly being collected, stored and shared - the notion of anonymity is not guaranteed. Lambert offers these portraits as almost an inverse form of ‘light therapy’, adding insight and accessibly to the complex language of digital data sets. Data Blue investigates the way we peer into deep recesses of the mind and the data structures of the internet, finding intricacies and complexities in our willingness to disclose personal data.

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https://www.kclart.com/datablue

I am king without crown

Essay: Soft light, hard data.
Written by: Melissa Burnet Rice

The in- between time of the “blue moment” echoes across the snow and ice covered ground. Indirect diffused light tints the sky blue, with fewer than four hours of daylight glimpsed during the depths of winter in Finland. In higher latitudes, this “blue moment” can last hours and is the period that separates day from a deep, never-ending night. Winter months crystalize into these in-between times where residents and visitors incubate indoors while the landscape is frozen in the gloaming.

In our everyday, sunlight reaches Earth’s prismatic atmosphere and is scattered directionless by gases and particles in the air. Blue light scatters more than other colours as it travels in shorter, smaller waves - this relative diffusion of shorter wavelengths paints the Finnish winter landscape and Lambert’s nine subjects in an eerie glow.

In Kenneth Lambert’s Data Blue, portraits of his fellow residents are captured by a process of digital cartography. Soft blue light shines onto the subjects, lighting the textural spaces of their face, inviting them to share their desires and secrets while peering into their own psyche through the confessional anonymity of data collection.

These repetitive mapped moments look deep into the personal details of each subject and offer to Lambert and his camera a digital portrait, reflecting the subject back through layers of technology. Here, this digital cartography takes the form of volumetric data, plotted along an invisible axis and swirled into a dot-to-dot puzzle, where the viewers are asked to do their own processing. Data Blue is laced with allusions to data anonymization - by joining the dots, a point cloud emerges to reveal a complex portrait that speaks to the concept of privacy.

Lambert’s captured data portraits represent points plotted on a graph, the in-between allowing the viewer to paint their own picture amongst the visualised hard data. Like the flickering of an image on a cinema screen, these still images and videos are given form only in our minds-eye, as our brain is purpose built for filling in the blanks of visual data. Artificial Intelligence processes are only now looking to approximate the human mind’s guess working abilities with Google’s Deep Mind neural network dreaming up digital hallucinatory associations devoid of meaning. There is an unknowing innocence and looming terror around AI’s inability to extrapolate inferences. AI algorithms also supercharge surveillance and threaten our privacy, yet we voluntarily navigate within this new technological context.

These fractalised data portraits, both interpolate and abstract the figure in a similar manner that data in the cloud of the internet tracks us. Our own daily data trail drifts along behind us as we search the internet, painting its own incomplete portrait of each of us into the mirror world of the web. A world of likes, discarded shopping carts, web searches and that millisecond of lingering on a photo - these are all registered by the machine. A machine we have built. The web and the cloud is our own man-machine converter and we, collectively and willingly use it billions of times a day to travel into the internet. Like-wise our GPS wanderings are registered via our aggregate route from home, to school, to work, to the market, to the spot where we pause to contemplate the growth of a root in the sidewalk, or our detour down a side street to catch a glimpse of sunlight striking a particular building before the sun dips below the horizon.

With an immeasurable amount of personal and sensitive data constantly being collected, stored and shared - the notion of anonymity is not guaranteed. Lambert offers these portraits as almost an inverse form of ‘light therapy’, adding insight and accessibly to the complex language of digital data sets. Data Blue investigates the way we peer into deep recesses of the mind and the data structures of the internet, finding intricacies and complexities in our willingness to disclose personal data.

see more
https://www.kclart.com/datablue



I prayed to allay my anxiety

Essay: Soft light, hard data.
Written by: Melissa Burnet Rice

The in- between time of the “blue moment” echoes across the snow and ice covered ground. Indirect diffused light tints the sky blue, with fewer than four hours of daylight glimpsed during the depths of winter in Finland. In higher latitudes, this “blue moment” can last hours and is the period that separates day from a deep, never-ending night. Winter months crystalize into these in-between times where residents and visitors incubate indoors while the landscape is frozen in the gloaming. 

In our everyday, sunlight reaches Earth’s prismatic atmosphere and is scattered directionless by gases and particles in the air. Blue light scatters more than other colours as it travels in shorter, smaller waves - this relative diffusion of shorter wavelengths paints the Finnish winter landscape and Lambert’s nine subjects in an eerie glow.

In Kenneth Lambert’s Data Blue, portraits of his fellow residents are captured by a process of digital cartography. Soft blue light shines onto the subjects, lighting the textural spaces of their face, inviting them to share their desires and secrets while peering into their own psyche through the confessional anonymity of data collection. 

These repetitive mapped moments look deep into the personal details of each subject and offer to Lambert and his camera a digital portrait, reflecting the subject back through layers of technology. Here, this digital cartography takes the form of volumetric data, plotted along an invisible axis and swirled into a dot-to-dot puzzle, where the viewers are asked to do their own processing. Data Blue is laced with allusions to data anonymization - by joining the dots, a point cloud emerges to reveal a complex portrait that speaks to the concept of privacy.

Lambert’s captured data portraits represent points plotted on a graph, the in-between allowing the viewer to paint their own picture amongst the visualised hard data. Like the flickering of an image on a cinema screen, these still images and videos are given form only in our minds-eye, as our brain is purpose built for filling in the blanks of visual data. Artificial Intelligence processes are only now looking to approximate the human mind’s guess working abilities with Google’s Deep Mind neural network dreaming up digital hallucinatory associations devoid of meaning. There is an unknowing innocence and looming terror around AI’s inability to extrapolate inferences. AI algorithms also supercharge surveillance and threaten our privacy, yet we voluntarily navigate within this new technological context.

These fractalised data portraits, both interpolate and abstract the figure in a similar manner that data in the cloud of the internet tracks us. Our own daily data trail drifts along behind us as we search the internet, painting its own incomplete portrait of each of us into the mirror world of the web. A world of likes, discarded shopping carts, web searches and that millisecond of lingering on a photo - these are all registered by the machine. A machine we have built. The web and the cloud is our own man-machine converter and we, collectively and willingly use it billions of times a day to travel into the internet. Like-wise our GPS wanderings are registered via our aggregate route from home, to school, to work, to the market, to the spot where we pause to contemplate the growth of a root in the sidewalk, or our detour down a side street to catch a glimpse of sunlight striking a particular building before the sun dips below the horizon. 

With an immeasurable amount of personal and sensitive data constantly being collected, stored and shared - the notion of anonymity is not guaranteed. Lambert offers these portraits as almost an inverse form of ‘light therapy’, adding insight and accessibly to the complex language of digital data sets. Data Blue investigates the way we peer into deep recesses of the mind and the data structures of the internet, finding intricacies and complexities in our willingness to disclose personal data. 

see more
https://www.kclart.com/datablue

A quiet space to live or die

Geomorphic Abstractions is a series of site-specific digital works created by artist Kenneth Lambert, concluding his residency period at Woodford Academy April-May 2021. In this work, the artist explores deep time by dissolving photographic material captured on-site within the interior and exterior spaces within Woodford Academy as timelapse sequences. The sequences were then digitally dissolved and projected over geographic forms derived from aerial maps of Woodford Academy’s area. The resulting work is a series of beguiling colour fields which undulate over forms in a sustained period. The integration of sound and ever-changing colour state creates a meditation for the environment from which it was conceived.

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Geomorphic Abstractions 3

Geomorphic Abstractions is a series of site-specific digital works created by artist Kenneth Lambert, concluding his residency period at Woodford Academy April-May 2021.  In this work, the artist explores deep time by dissolving photographic material captured on-site within the interior and exterior spaces within Woodford Academy as timelapse sequences. The sequences were then digitally dissolved and projected over geographic forms derived from aerial maps of Woodford Academy’s area. The resulting work is a series of beguiling colour fields which undulate over forms in a sustained period. The integration of sound and ever-changing colour state creates a meditation for the environment from which it was conceived.

 ‘The Blue Mountains was created over 50 million years ago, with the Darug and Gundungurra peoples of the Ngurra country tracing back 20,000 years as its custodians. My response to a historical site like Woodford Academy, the oldest colonial building in the Blue Mountains area, evolved into the broader context of the surrounding environment and the perception of deep time. This relationship became the inspiration for my response and a way to translate the theme of spatial temporality. The perpetual nature of light tracing over an environment in the process of constant change due to geomorphic forces became a discreet way of responding to the site, whilst conveying the enduring and unique qualities of the environment which frames it.’ 

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Geomorphic Abstractions 2

Geomorphic Abstractions is a series of site-specific digital works created by artist Kenneth Lambert, concluding his residency period at Woodford Academy April-May 2021.  In this work, the artist explores deep time by dissolving photographic material captured on-site within the interior and exterior spaces within Woodford Academy as timelapse sequences. The sequences were then digitally dissolved and projected over geographic forms derived from aerial maps of Woodford Academy’s area. The resulting work is a series of beguiling colour fields which undulate over forms in a sustained period. The integration of sound and ever-changing colour state creates a meditation for the environment from which it was conceived.

More
https://www.kclart.com/geomorphicabstractions

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Kenneth Lambert