As a visual artist, I am making use of the exclusively human ability (and at the same time obsession) to communicate by recreating one’s environment in visual images which serve as surrogates in man-made pseudo-realities. This is based on recognition, which in contemporary society is based to the greatest percentage on the human visual sense, visual memory and association. Since 2012 I developed various projects investigating what factors have to be met for a human audience to recognize a man-made image. One aspect within this body of work of particular interest to me is the definition of “real“.
This question has become increasingly interesting since the growing communication through the internet, in particular through social media platforms, where what in pre-internet times used to be known as “reality” can be exchanged with a different reality that exists only online and that only comes into existence through the publification on the internet. Through lens-based documentation of an object, person or situation, the depicted item can be exchanged with its 2d image, which apparently deletes the difference between the original and the depicted image of it. Where two versions of one item, for example, a clay object exist, the online version seems often to overrides the 3d original.

Josiane Keller “sheep face front – triple” (2021)