Techno-Spectre

Agate Tūna’s artwork, Techno-Spectre, challenges the familiar landscape of photography, immersing viewers in a fascinating cosmos where historical interpretations of capturing the unseen intertwine with the connection between photography, spirituality, and technology. The artwork, Techno-Spectre, metaphorically refers to the digital footprints left in the virtual world. These traces range from insignificant, like saved website data, to more visible, like social media posts, which can continue to haunt our online personas long after they’re created. Our digital presence, from archived emails to online interactions, spreads across the web's vast electrical spectrum, creating a substantial ghostly presence. The ghost, a recurring motif in the author’s artistic activity, embodies the continuous practice of capturing and depicting the elusive in photography. Central to the artwork is the use of chemigrams, created on photosensitive paper with a photo fixer and developer. Merging photography with drawing, she manipulates photosensitive paper both chemically and physically, scratching, folding, painting, and making marks to introduce another dimension of expression. Later, the images are printed on aluminium (dibond), giving the material a new layer of materiality. By bending the surface of the aluminium (dibond), the image, initially constrained within a two-dimensional frame, begins to capture a three-dimensional world. This experimental photographic technique, akin to a carefully executed magic trick, captures images without a camera. In this process, the power of photography is found not only in the final product but in the intricate and multifaceted creation process itself.