James Loftus
I reverse-engineer and mutate instruments associated with art, science, architecture and ritual. Positioning my practice at a notional point of convergence between these disciplines.
Currently, I make and use pinhole cameras but I am not a photographer. Rather, I am an artist who uses the manifold nature of photography as both tool and material. I am following an intuition that the disparate and often arcane precedents of photography conjoin at an obscure but meaningful point of origin.
I deploy these seeing machines to survey the city's dark matter of neglected marginal spaces and more recently the pristine geometry of regeneration projects. This process re-examines the intimate co-evolution of optical technology and architectural space.
Tesseract
Panopticon
2008
The 'Tesseract Panopticon' is a pinhole camera in the form of the four dimensional Hypercube. This maintains its position outside of the temporal assumptions of conventional photography.
It exposes a contiguous cubic net shape of film as opposed to six separate exposures. In keeping with its origins as a symbolic tool for dimensional transmutation it allows the three dimensional cubic exposure to be unfolded into a two dimensional image which in turn presents the simultaneous view of six vistas previously perpendicular to each other.
Bluecoat Gallery Survey Image +/-