Peter Freund Projects

< Short Story >

The project comprises a generative mechanism built from an artistic misuse of digital code. A two-step: Images and texts are appropriated from the cultural archive and coupled to form networks of obliquely associated image-text pairs. A text is then selected from each network and entered directly into the underlying code-bed of the digital image with which it has been paired. A rupture results in the picture, and from this glitch a grid is extracted and scaled up multifold. The relationship between grid as surface and network as depth forms the project's conceptual core:

The essence of surface and depth:
incommensurability;
that is to say,
radical ornamentalism and radical obscurantism.

The Lost Grids project to-date has yielded prints, artist books, video installations, and performance-based work (samples below).

[Perspective Experiment]
After Filippo Brunelleschi
(Early 15th Century)

« Manetto, known as il Grasso, was prosperous and good-natured, but one day had the misfortune of incurring Filippo’s ire after missing a social gathering. Never one to resist retaliation, Filippo resolved to exact his revenge for this perceived slight by persuading a wide cast of characters to convince Manetto that he had metamorphosed into someone else: a well-known Florentine named Matteo. »

Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome (2000)

C’ode
60 min loop
2026

This video-sound installation responds to the need to reconceptualize the archival image. The contemporary image is split between its specular surface, availed for human contemplation, and its digital, algorithmic depth that fuels large instrumentalized, techno-political systems. C’ode flips the specular and instrumental relation. The latter is brought into the foreground as the focus of contemplative interest while the former is driven into the background as if it were the material excuse for an operation.  

C’ode comprises an hour-long video-sound installation that is part of the ongoing project entitled «Lost Grids: or How to Explain Digital Media to a Dead Socialist» (2018-Present). A set of visual glitches is produced by inserting specific cultural texts into the code-bed of archival imagery. Each glitch is magnified and adapted as the visual track of the installation. Extracts from the underlying hexadecimal code of each glitch are recited accompanied by subtitles that reveal that a vocal interpretation is taking place. The recitation oscillates between «languages»: English, Mandarin, and mathematical shortcuts.

SELECT-ALL >

In this manifestation (see below), the hexadecimal code is presented in a linear format without line-breaks, abstaining from the necessary discontinuities found in code production, paragraphing, and poetic enjambment. One here encounters the impossibility of reading and viewing at the same time – that is, code as text and as image.