residue (more than memory and less than reason), 2012

As Boris Groys has argued, in the age of biopolitics where life is increasingly quantified and artificially registered, embodied particularity is introduced not through the artwork but rather through the art document and archive. This series consists of documentations of the artist's artworks, each coupled with the specific dream that he had on the same day that the photographs were taken. Following Benjamin, Groys argues that the art document paradoxically restores the aura and singularity that the reproducibility of the artwork destroys. Utilizing the common info management technique of metadata tagging (where photographic images are inscribed with cataloguing information to attempt an authentic contextualization), the artist inscribes the art documentations with the metadata of dreams as an alternative version to the increasingly normatized methodology of quantitatively archiving ‘being.’ By utilizing dreams to catalogue and tag art documentations, the sterile and mechanized process of documentation in contemporary digital culture and biopolitics is replaced by one of embodied and situated particularity, unrepeatable and untransposable, in Georges Bataille’s sense.