Lossy
HK, MO
2025
Photography (Monochrome)
Contact for use.
I think this way of seeing started with our old computer, a beige PC our family had in the nineties. I’d spend hours in MS Paint, scattering the silent noise of the spray can and spilling the bucket fill across white canvases, eventually clogging the tiny hard drive with heavy BMP files.
I used the same machine to fly a biplane in Sopwith. The game’s soundtrack was a jagged, screaming waveform meant to resemble an engine. If you clicked ‘turbo’ on the computer’s casing, everything would speed up, including the sound.
Sometimes the world can feel like that old monitor.
I’m walking through the cargo bay of the industrial building. The humidity of summer has lifted, replaced by a scent similar to burnt coffee.
The camera is in my hand. My own subtraction machine. It takes this scorched atmosphere and strips it down to a dithered grid of zeros and ones. Black and white.
It only thinks in simple terms.
A high-definition photograph claims to own what it sees. It pretends that time can be frozen without loss. Hito Steyerl speaks of ‘poor images’, files that degrade as they circulate on the internet, worn down by speed.
But these images are born poor. They don’t need the internet to degrade them; the friction of reality is enough.
That old PC didn’t make it to my teenage years. It was the family’s machine. But the family fractured when Mum pass away. By my teenage years, the rest of us had retreated into the private, folding shadows of laptops.
In that new silence, there was only the screeching sound of a modem connecting to the internet... Nowadays, on the MTR to Chai Wan, the camera makes no such attempt. It does not scream to be heard. It offers no false promises of connection. It only documents distance.
In the end, the machine does what the brain cannot: it stops. The sensor is a guillotine for time. It forces the noise to stand still, trapping the interference inside the frame.