Akihiko Miyoshi

Akihiko Miyoshi is a Portland based artist that uses other areas of interest to him to rationalize what is Art. He was originally a computer scientist and many of his artistic ideas fall under the category of this realm and how they have to do with art. In his lecture, first he asked what the act of pointing under the modernist view had to do with art. He explained that modernism put a prohibition on photography as an artistic or aesthetic expression and became solely about pointing. Much of his work aimed to address photographic theories as well. In his 18% gray he acknowledges the crisis of the real in photography by focusing on a mirror with a gray card attached to it, which revealed all the separate colors of the card and then juxtaposed it with the same image except focused behind the plane of the gray card, this time making it appear gray again. In this work, Miyoshi deconstructs the ideas of photography and it's ability to convey reality. Some of his other work had to do with representation as well. I thought he put it quite beautifully when he said that, "representation is always haunted by absence". He claimed that in our digital age, photographs don't have material substance anymore and photography has become merely information. This idea helped him to answer another question he often ponders, "So then why do we still go to see pictures?". In his work Pixel Paintings, he enlarged photographs and hand-painted each pixel. This act of painting the image answered his question with making the materiality of images more explicit, that is why we go to see photographs. Lastly, Akihiko Miyoshi claimed that using the same medium to self-criticize posits limits on what we can definitely know about a discipline within a structure of one discipline.