Clare Strand

A Butterfly and a Horse

You might be thinking what place does an analogue darkroom have in a contemporary digital design festival? The artist Clare Strand is also asking this question. Strand is considered a photographic artist though hasn’t used a camera since 2012, partly as a response to the rapid development and use of digital technology and the proliferation of photographic imagery. To mark this analogue to digital shift Strand presents her old, decommissioned, dust-gathering darkroom enlarger and situates it within the V&A, offering participants to enter a darkroom experience and expose a photographic print. The two images used in the project are of a butterfly and of a horse, referencing the first electronic images transmitted by Shelford Bidwell in 1880.

Bridging the advances between Bidwell’s experiments and recent technical advances, an AI programme has been trained on Strands work prior to her 2012 move away from ‘traditional’ photography, and presents us with two images in her own ‘style’.

The Butterfly and a Horse project acknowledges not only the analogue photographic image, but also contemporary digital generative image-making, in both its creation and its circulation.

You will receive your darkroom image via postal mail. You are however encouraged to share your result on the Butterfly and Horse instagram #butterflyhorse.

"The Butterfly and Horse experience is a monument to the analogue, digital, networked, and generative image. All of which jostle together, for better or for worse, in our image centric lives”  Clare Strand.

For a comprehensice archive of the project and event information please click here