Blackmoth.org is a website by Kari Altmann.
The content of the site is a relatively lengthy, vertically-scrolling display of approximately seventy still images and YouTube video players set off against a white background – no text.
That in itself is nothing new – artists have been making these types of heterogeneous found image displays for some time now and, as Seth Price points out in his Teen Image essay, the style is itself lifted from something print magazines have been exploring for at least fifteen years.
But what distinguishes Altmann’s project from what Price terms “hoardings” is the self-reflexive intentionality of her particular images.
She wants to show you something in particular: time, decay, built-in obsolescence. We see collisions of two themes: obsolete technologies of the “just past” such as compact discs or previous generations of flat-screen televisions as well as crumbling architectural details and rock formations of the ancient past.
In the most potent images, we see both at once – dialectically. The first diptych of images at the top of the page gets at this. In the image to the left of the diptych, one views what appears to be two fangs – the sort of relic one might see in a display of fossils and bones of pre-historic animals at a natural history museum.
However, there is a USB connection sticking out of the base of each of these fangs. Their power resides not in the prick of their tips, but in the information they store as little Flash Drives.
In the image to the right of the diptych, one views a broken slab of what, at first glance anyway, reads as an “ancient monument” – perhaps a temple – displayed behind a glass cube in a museum setting.
However, as much as one views the ancient slab, one views the rainbow colored reflection ring generated by the flash of a digital camera. The image is a collision between the ancient and technological.
As one scrolls-down through the rest of Altmann’s images, this tension is explored again and again and again. Through the repetition of the theme of technology and ancient ruins, Altmann creates a portrait of endless technological obsolescence.