Creative Industry staff and students from Media, Games and Art had the pleasure of welcoming guest speaker Artist Sam Burford last term.
Sam's work has been shown worldwide; he spoke with our students about his experiences, inspirations, tools and techniques.
Describing himself as a technological flâneur who meanders through a range of technical/aesthetic concerns, Burford continues to develop his wide-ranging artistic practice, exploring the ways that technology generates new aesthetic forms. For 2023, Burford iterates beyond his research ‘Journey to the Image - Searching for Traces of the Indexical within Photorealistic Rendered Imagery’ (2019, PhD, University of the Arts London) with a body of work rooted in the traditions of photography that highlights the artist’s explorations into visualising space time, cinematic temporal portraiture, haptic data visualisation, photorealism and randomness.
Within his multimodal practice, Burford deploys a range of tools including handmade cameras, 3D printing and bespoke machine learning methods to explore innovative photographic representations of cinematic time and cultural memory, occasionally interspersed with irresistible forays into the uncanny valley.
Just as photography introduced the concept of the ‘optical unconscious’ and psychoanalysis disclosed the ’intellectual unconscious’, so the compressed structures of latent space provide the agency to explore what Emad Mostaque describes as ‘humanity’s collective unconscious’. In light of this, Dr Burford argues that the current dominion of photography as the dominant force used to represent the world is coming to an end, and that we are now witnessing the introduction of new tools that provide unprecedented means to see the spirit of this age assembling itself before our eyes.
