Fabienne Hess
Hits and Misses (from the archive)
Fabienne Hess worked directly with the University of Edinburgh Collections to create Hits And Misses, a visual reinterpretation of the collection that offers a profoundly alternative way of seeing it.
Hess created a large silk fabric containing every available image from the digital archive, arranged without categorisation or hierarchy. By treating the 20,000+ images this way she highlighted the overwhelming enormity of the collection, whilst revealing specific trends and traits contained within it. The fabric was accompanied by two monitors, one showing the images that have been viewed most frequently on the University’s website, the other showing a selection of the approximately 6,000 images that had never been accessed at all. Updated weekly, the audience had the ability to directly influence the work through their online activity.
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Zebras Blanks and Blobs
As part of the project Hess also created a series of 'sub-collections' from the archive. Brought together due to a shared formal characteristic, eg. images containing a triangle, a red dot, or a person raising an arm, these new groupings offered a meditation on how the new image-rich digital environment is changing the way we see, and understand, our world.
The series appeared online throughout the exhibition period, as well as being displayed on a large screen in the Old Collage Quad. The project then developed into the publication, Zebras Blanks and Blobs, containing 13 ‘collections’ made with over 1,200 images from the archive.
Published by common-editions and available here
Artist Interview
Interview between Fabienne Hess and Neil Lebeter, Curator of the University of Edinburgh Art Collection
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Fabienne Hess is a London-based Swiss artist. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2012 and has since shown her work, among other places, at Art Night, Serpentine Galleries, French Riviera, London; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes; Baltic, Newcastle; Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam and Dakar Biennale. She has been awarded a fellowship by Artangel, published an artist book with Common Editions and has received commissions from LUX artists’ moving image, the University of Edinburgh and the BBC.