6 May 2013
TOMMASOPANZERI
Tommaso Panzeri lives and works in Genova, Italy
How I blew my iPhone into an art-making tool By Tommaso Panzeri
A while ago my telephone started to give up un me. Slow, often failing to connect, autozoom function starting randomly. The only thing that was working was the camera but results were not entirely satisfactory. My good old Nikon was much better but not as pocketable. Street photography was a dream far from easy reach a I was too timid to approach subjects at close quarter. I ended up downloading tons of useless apps and quickly filling up the 14 Gb memory. In the end I used it for the music and to play with images. A digital collection of absurd images clogged up my phone and in the end I deleted the lot. I have no record of the shots I had
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taken before the great reset. Then a new idea sprang to mind: I could easily alter a basic blank shot by using decim8, a funny application. i could then alter the colors at will with photoshop and create new pictures by cropping and enlarging details. Through a very simple process blank shots of nothing but black and white could create an infinite set of combinations in proportions, dimensions and colours. By taking a shot of the camera roll, pictures were juxtaposed casually and I could re-shoot the interesting, crop them, edit them, enlarge them. Using exclusively thee apps for iPhone, decim8, photoshop express and Lithogram I have created a vast collection of
digital images that have the values of painted matter. The next step will be that of printing them in sets of limited edition and then pick the most interesting of them to turn them into painted matters. The media of choice I believe will be oil treated in the way Ad Reinhardt used to do, taking as much binder away leaving a very fragile film of pigment as pure as possible. Size will be critical, leaving the small view of the iPhone screen for the frightening dimension of large canvases. Colour and size will king and queen in my blown digital world. In the next few pages there are some of the images that have attention so far.