Christopher Rizkallah

My work is initiated by objects found in everyday life modified and regurgitated into multiple forms. I work with digital and analogue media, jumping between both. My accomplice is the computer, a partner that I often have conversations with.

I work in loops. The machine scans a photo, I distort it, print it, and sometimes feed it back to the computer. Thus, images exist in infinite variations that play on my interventions contrasted with the computer’s light-speed processing. My recent fascination is in testing the limits of an analogue scanner. These machines have their unspoken rules that dictate the outcome of a scanned image. Rather than using a scanner to recreate an image I use it to create new images.

With the increase of time spent at home I ‘action scan’ miscellaneous objects, seeking a play in motion and depths of field as the image is produced and transposed. This results in an almost cubistic multiple perspective of the object in a glitched image. New colours appear randomly as I vary with the speed of the action of moving an object and the quality of the coloured ink and paper.

I consider myself a child of the internet; I watched technology rapidly evolve and witnessed its shortcomings. The internet speed in Lebanon, where I grew up, could never keep up with the HD content created for consumption. My internet connection lagged, causing videos to distort and web pages to load in portions, if at all. As frustrating as this sounds, I find inspiration in the loss of data. I deliberately choose to distort my work in an exercise of forming a broken picture and legitimizing the clarity of incomplete images.

The recent explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020 is another subject matter that I explore in my work. The site of impact appearing from across my window, about 500 meters away. I have been documenting the port since 2014 and the iconic grain silo which shielded a part of the capital from the devastating explosion.