Tobias Futers

My work engages with the role of communication within art. Contextualised by proposals for transient forms of art production such as Hito Steyerl’s “In Defence of The Poor Image” and Ursula K.le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, my work aims to be wholly insecure and made functional through viewer interaction.

I am currently working through a series of ‘pixel’ drawings which I have been displaying slightly compressed between long wooden planks. Walter Benjamin considers the ‘aura’ of an image to be depleted through its repetition. If digital imagery, as described by Hito Steyerl, is fundamentally a copy (i.e. something repeated), then we can consider that which inherits culture through the digital to be ‘aura-less. These drawings present pixelated sentences such as “I wish I knew what it takes” as a way of representing a certain pervading, contemporary sense of illegitimacy.