“As a photographer, I am a hunter and an archaeologist, searching through disintegrating video broadcasts for new entities to immortalise.”
Darren Tynan is an Australian photographer with an interdisciplinary approach. In 2015, Tynan graduated from Edith Cowan University with a Bachelor of Arts, Media major, and completed a Bachelor of Photomedia in 2016 with advanced standing. Initially inspired by documentary photography, Darren later started his interest in experimental contemporary photography, which encouraged him to explore his own ideas and creative processes while expressing abstract concepts. As an artist, Tynan explores serendipity as a generative device and embraces technical malfunction and failure as a mode of photographic archaeology and culture criticism. His works have been featured in various international exhibitions as well as his home city of Perth in Western Australia.
In one of his most recent projects ’Ghost’, Tynan transforms video footage from free-to-air Vietnamese television channels into an experimental series of images. Ghost is replete with signal interference anomalies, video codec errors, aliasing and tracking errors, and other visual artefacts that manifest unpredictably during the creative process. Using a digital camera, a high gain antenna, and obsolete analogue television technology, Tynan presents a unique pointillist view of photographic portraiture. The outcome was various unfamiliar faces that appear ghostly and distorted through the camera’s lens. They become completely unrecognisable from the originally intended broadcast.
Ghost: Untitled 4, Digital photograph, 2018
“There’s a lot of randomness, disintegration, and transmutation in these works. I can never go back and take the picture again as it’s an organic process where I’m actually photographing the video footage on the TV as it’s mutating.”
Instead of presenting a particular message directly, Tynan hopes that his audience can explore the series by themselves, which allows them to decide on meanings and how these works relate to them. At the same time, he also wants to encourage any creatives to consider broadcast errors as a potential tool to create new digital works.
To explore more of Darren Tynan's works, see the collection on our website.
Ghost: Untitled 14, Digital photograph, 2018
Exhibition history of Darren Tynan:
Solo Exhibitions
Fear of Missing Out, Toong, Saigon, Vietnam, September 2018
Group Exhibitions
Paradise’s Parasite III, Project Spectrum, Perth, Australia, 2018
Paradise's Parasite II, Yinghuang Tea Rooms, USST, Shanghai, China, 2017
Paradise’s Parasite, Dream Wharf, Shanghai, China, 2017
Paradise's Parasite, Huijian Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2017
Blink Photographic Awards, Perth, Australia, 2016
Exhale, Huijian Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2016
Exhale, Gallery 25, Perth, Australia, 2016
25 Under 25 Exhibition, Moore Gallery, Fremantle, Australia, 2015