honorable mention
Casper Fitzhue belgium
title
Optimal Prime
Picture this: Earth, after years of wars and industrial spillage, toxic waste and climatic imbalance, the systematic annihilation of bees. A near or distant future, where all this became too much, resulting in the destruction of all organic plant life. That is the imaginary space/time in which my project was conceived.
What would it look like if future Man attempted to build monuments to flowers from the scraps of the same technology that killed them? Using only recycled plastic and metal from DIY warplanes, cars, and tanks, I created a new species of robots - a message from the future. And yes, these flowers might smell of regret but, whether the future is fully machine or not, my belief is this: in the absence of hope, we will learn how to manufacture some.
Because we all miss beautiful things and somehow miss them most when they are gone, that moment in time when we'll have encountered mass-produced means of artificial respiration — that vibrant age and time will be our Optimal Prime.
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Please note these images were made with no retouching or manipulation; just long shutter exposures and movement. The challenge was to make a man-made sculpture look alive as if powered from within.
His practice has at its core a very human need for storytelling. Most commonly, he explores cyber-optimism, change as a hopeful state of being and pathways to traumatic growth. Currently, he is working on developing projects on what the manufacture of future hope means in a technocentric system by means of curating new types of collaboration.
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entry description
While still a cyber optimist, at times I feel nostalgic about things that haven't even happened yet.Picture this: Earth, after years of wars and industrial spillage, toxic waste and climatic imbalance, the systematic annihilation of bees. A near or distant future, where all this became too much, resulting in the destruction of all organic plant life. That is the imaginary space/time in which my project was conceived.
What would it look like if future Man attempted to build monuments to flowers from the scraps of the same technology that killed them? Using only recycled plastic and metal from DIY warplanes, cars, and tanks, I created a new species of robots - a message from the future. And yes, these flowers might smell of regret but, whether the future is fully machine or not, my belief is this: in the absence of hope, we will learn how to manufacture some.
Because we all miss beautiful things and somehow miss them most when they are gone, that moment in time when we'll have encountered mass-produced means of artificial respiration — that vibrant age and time will be our Optimal Prime.
_________
Please note these images were made with no retouching or manipulation; just long shutter exposures and movement. The challenge was to make a man-made sculpture look alive as if powered from within.
about the photographer
There is a place at the crossroads of art, design, fashion & performance and it is there that Casper Fitzhue was born. At 27, he graduated his MA Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Antwerp. Interested in multi-media approaches to inciting thought, Fitzhue was proclaimed ‘a futurologist’ by the curators of the 2016 BredaPhoto Festival. His most recent project, Cow Princess & The Spacetime Where We Re-Evaluate Our Feelings, is a mass collab. It takes cues from sci-fi imagery to present portraits of fluid beings in the process of becoming.His practice has at its core a very human need for storytelling. Most commonly, he explores cyber-optimism, change as a hopeful state of being and pathways to traumatic growth. Currently, he is working on developing projects on what the manufacture of future hope means in a technocentric system by means of curating new types of collaboration.
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