Born 1977. Lives and work in Copenhagen.
Jesper Carlsen primarily works with computer-generated visual art, occasionally employing artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other digital renditions in order to reflect upon our human perception and explore how we develop signs in a contemporary, digitized world. In a way, the digital has its own economy, its own material. Jesper Carlsen wishes to dive into the digital reality through a materialistic study.
“What I want is not to create another illusion, but to create images that depicted the digital logics that lie behind. Approaching these 3D simulations, as were they any other material, and examine its potential and distinctiveness,” explains Jesper Carlsen.
The works can be understood as coded images that create a digital simulation of materiality and material. The materiality of the digital is an electrical charging in celiac. It is therefore small, abstract, and in fact too broad to talk about as traditional material. What we might talk about are the new images it creates; on the surface it looks like the photography, but in the evolutionary process it moves towards the more traditional mixture of pigment and the construction of spatial objects – a kind of digital scenery of points where the surfaces are stretched as a representation of a traditional material.
We live in a society where we constantly move between two different realities – a digital, and a physical one. The digital takes the form of a shadow-existence as it may look like all other physical materials – or more precisely, it can look like a photo of a material. And at a time where things almost have not happened if there is no picture to document it, the meaning of it cannot be underestimated when it comes to our understanding and perception of reality.
