STATIC by Adil Hasan

Self Published

Author / Photographer : ADIL HASAN
Design and Edit: ADIL HASAN
Edition of 300 

9.25 x 6.25”
192 Pages, 48 french folds (8 page fold technique),
fine art gloss paper treated with
high gloss laminate on all 192 pages

Black soft cover with reflective aluminium foil pasting, debossing and silver screenprinting and foiling

Language : English

ISBN : 978-93-6038-463-0

IF A MACHINE COULD CATCH A SONG FROM THE AIR, COULD IT ALSO CATCH A THOUGHT?

What is the role of the TV in our lives? Early contemplation oscillated between a gift from the gods and a Trojan horse; entering our houses under the pretext of harmless entertainment, while quietly undermining the fabric of our societies.

My generation has hardly known life without it, an illuminated presence in the room, transmitting images of wars, disasters, desire, violence and fantasy. Decades later, its descendants have become the phone, the computer, the tablet. What was once broadcast to everyone is now selected for each of us.

STATIC is a meditation on spectral mechanics in an age of perpetual transmission. Beginning with the television, one of the twentieth century's most powerful instruments of mass persuasion, it considers the evolution of the screen into today's algorithmic systems, where feeds are personalised, attention is harvested, and reality can be manufactured.

The external images are composed around recursions of the rectangular: screen, window, mirror, suggesting architectures of entrapment, an echo chamber of white noise, flickering with the quiet erosion of context. 

Embedded within the book's 48, folds are the images I live with. Images encountered through television, phone and computer screens, which I have photographed. They range from science fiction to images of political violence, environmental catastrophe, social unrest, and the private psychological residue of living through a world in perpetual crisis. These images are not presented openly, accessible only through the physical act of opening the folds. They are withheld, then revealed, until what was hidden becomes the medium itself.

STATIC begins and ends in black. Between these fields of darkness, the book is printed on extremely high-gloss paper, bringing the physical surface of the page into proximity with the backlit light of a screen. The gloss paper catches the light of the tv on the opposite page, and reflects the viewer back into the book, collapsing the distance between photographic object, screen and observer.

The book's cover takes the form of a tv screen, its static silver surface reflecting a distorted mirror-portrait, suggesting that the algorithm itself has become a kind of self-portrait. It also recalls the familiar mythology of the tin-foil hat: the absurd paranoia that a layer of foil might protect the mind from invisible airwaves.