The Surface Opens

The colour codes of Living Atlas looked more rigid than the work they organise. Their clean edges and uniform digital fields divide instructions into recognisable groups. In performance, those instructions pass between bodies, places and memories. Each interpretation alters what it receives. The codes organise that movement while retaining their own immaculate appearance.

At AGA LAB, we are submitting the codes to the process they have organised all along.

Our maps begin with online searches. Before visiting places, we annotate them with prosthetic memories: stories, images and accounts through which those places have already entered our lives. On site, we write our encounters over those expectations. Further visits add further layers. Information accumulates until roads disappear beneath it. The map grows saturated with memories while becoming less able to guide us home.

We are now feeding that process back into the colour codes. Extracting them from the instructions allows us to interrupt their use and work directly on their surfaces.

With copper plates, acid and airbrush, we bring the colours out of their digital smoothness. Working by hand, we vary the density and distribution of the aquatint ground. Acid bites the exposed copper; ink and pressure transfer the resulting grain to damp paper.

From a distance, the colour appears saturated and continuous. Come closer and its continuity disperses into particles. Thousands of dots form a field that slowly opens. Stains interrupt its density; scratches draw the eye across it. The outline is easy to recognise. The surface takes longer.

Our return to the reduced vocabulary of Minimalism carries this accumulated history into the monochrome. We isolate a colour to attend to what its systematic use lets us pass over. It still identifies a set of instructions, yet its grain holds our attention beyond that recognition. Reduction gives us time to examine how we have learned to read it.

The maps let encounters revise our expectations of places. The aquatints extend that revision to the system through which we approach them. Before asking where to go, we ask how we arrived here.