Tristan Jones Photography - Faitours Forge

'Faitours Forge' is a portrayal of the relationship between identity and masquerade, the interplay between always-on connectivity and needy, intrusive technologies; a virtual space, represented by the mask, where the meta-self is forged.

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FORGE: "To form by heating and hammering; to beat into shape."
FAITOUR: "A person who deceives others".

Forging a 'Faitour' by beating and hammering their persona,
forging them into a fake identity.

'Meta Masks' - created to photograph for this series, shot as still life and motion sequences.
Each mask shot in studio under continuous daylight lighting (below), mixed daylight, RGB and UV light.

This series of masks contain a mixture of materials including Fluorescent Tape, UV Reactive Dyes, Mica Powders, Acrylic Paint, Spray Paint, Electro Luminescent Wires, Acrylic Beads, Wire, Metallic Tape, Glow in Dark Powder, Spray-Fix and Epoxy Resin coatings.

Exhibited as an installation of 24 C-Type Kodak Metallic Prints on Dibond, Two Screen Projections, Audio, Lighting

Meta Masks, 23 x 33cm, C-Type, Kodak Metallic on Dibond [01-12]
Stage Avatar, 41 x 27cm, C-Type, Kodak Metallic on Dibond [13-16]
Stage Avatar, 13 x 20cm, C-Type, Kodak Metallic on Dibond [17-24]

Video Projection, 4’ 16”, Video Projection, 3’ 21”, (looped)

Stills: Canon 5Ds R, Video Canon 5D IV.

'Video diptych' - created from long-exposure stills, animated in Premier Pro. Theis pair of (looping) video shorts were screened together as a diptych. Audio tracks were crafted to run together as a diptych and are scored to complement eachother.

I rebranded the video series under the psudonym Twisted Realm, a digital identity, and named them "Interminable Divergence" (read as: never-ending variation) to emphasize the seemingly endless 'digital versions' of oneself, and the potential to endlessly reconstitute these works - which are akin to digital DNA - taking the physical source, converting to digital, manipulating and re-manipulating to create an interminable family tree of variants.

The videos were projected side-by-side in an installation, audio from both videos complement eachother as they overlap and loop.

The footage is stop motion DSLR frames of the meta masks I made, as they hung within a studio set.

As part of my experimentation and iteration of the series, I used long exposure to capture their movement, photographing the moving masks as they swung, rotated, slowed, coming to a rest.

This resulted in interesting series of stills that I then animated.

There are 25 individual sequences within this video, looped and reversed at differing speeds and durations, to create the overall effect.

Some are inverted as digital negatives, others are pushed further into the creative realm, processed using Lightroom only.

'Stage Avatar' - I designed and constructed a human-scale set to photograph and video the series of Meta Masks as a living performance.

The aesthetics were created via a mixture of: Continuous RGB Lighting, UV Lights, a Live "VDJ" Kelidoscop Projection, EL Wires and my Muse in a body suit wearing the Masks.

Artists Statement:

'Faitours Forge' is a portrayal of the relationship between identity and masquerade, the interplay between always-on connectivity, intrusive technology and the platform. There is a powerful yet hypocritical duality of the platform’s questioning of self-worth and self-identification, whilst it duplicitously facilitates self-gratification, fulfilling the egotistical desire to be noticed, valued, praised, and adored.
We, the participants, masked behind the platform, perform for the world to see. As individuals, we’re assimilated by technological osmosis - into this ever-expanding metaverse, where the core persona is shaped, formed and informed through environmental and technological feedback, as a cognitive process. This is where the meta-self is forged. A subset of personas distinct from those which we carry into the physical world. They are virtual, yet we value and defend them and their existence, to the core.

Water, Earth, Air, Fire - Mythological tropes employed to bring sense to the chaos of identity, repurposed and technologically reinterpreted through my masks, serve as metaphors for the physicality of device, our pseudo-cyborg state of being, the handing over of self-sufficiency to technology. The stage, a construct symbolising the opaque cloak of platforms, the technological-medium we now exist within.

WATER: Code, Binary, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Metaverse, Digitization, The Platforms, Avatars. These all flow through the veigns of our connected existance.

EARTH: Silicone, Copper, Graphene, Gold, Tin, Lead, Rare Earths, Circuit Boards, Microchips, Cables, Wires, Interconnects and Interfaces. We transform what we mine, it in turn transforms us.

AIR: Internet, Wifi, Bluetooth, NFC, GSM, 2, 3, 4, 5G, Microwaves, Satellites. Disconnected, yet, connected.

FIRE: Electricity, Capacitance, Resistance, Electrons, Batteries, Solar, Lasing(fibreoptic), LED’s, Screens/Displays, Quantum, Physics. Etched into the fabric of material and society.