Giverny Remediated is an architectural installation of 21 large-scale (banner-sized) performative prints hung on the outside of Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park, London. For my ongoing series of Compressionist prints, I strap a desktop scanner, laptop and custom-made battery pack to my body, and perform images into existence. I might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around my neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies in a pond. The dynamism between my body, technology and the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are then produced as archival art objects.

The source material for Giverny Remediated is from another large installation, Giverny of the Midwest (2011), and was scanned during a week-long camping trip next to a lily pond in South Bend, Indiana, then edited together over the course of nearly 2 years. These images render water, lilies, leaves and other organic forms into lush and rippling images. The piece explicitly cites Monet’s large-scale painting and installation, Water Lilies (1914-1926), at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But Giverny of the Midwest and Giverny Remediated move between proximity and distance, and are broken down into differently-sized and -shaped prints. Here I attempt to amplify the tensions between flow and geometry, life and modularity, and place the works in dialogue with other trajectories of modern and contemporary art, while simultaneously activating the possibilities of working across digital and traditional forms.

Also part of this exhibition, Stern produced seven new Creative Commons licensed images in the lake at Finsbury Park with his scanner, all distributed at high resolution for free via a “dead drop” at the gallery, as well as online via Flickr. Rippling Images of Finsbury Park are shown above. Stern additionally built and left a scanner rig with the gallery assistants, who gave scanner hacking and scanner-print workshops throughout the Summer of 2015.