This presentation brings together fifteen new photographs, mostly made in Hong Kong earlier this year, shown here for the first time. The works focus on technology’s underlying structures, as a whole. At their center are images of microchips, enlarged and reframed so that their circuitry becomes a visual composite. Patterns normally hidden inside the machinery of digital life appear as compositions that hover between technical diagram and symbolic image. In this shift, the microchip is revealed not only as a tool of computation but also as a figure for the wider systems that currently shape how we live. The project underscores that digital culture is indeed grounded in material form. Each circuit is the result of labor, extraction, and design, and photography here becomes a means of reflecting on those hidden processes. Much like the unseen structures of today’s technology, photography is similarly transient. Hong Kong provides a particularly charged setting. The city blends old and new technologies seamlessly, where historically neon signage, ferries, and market stalls coexist with global finance and digital exchange. The images seek to capture the sense that technology is at once omnipresent and opaque: shaping our experience while evading full comprehension. Shown in the provisional space of the studio, these works are not final statements but propositions, an edit in process. Perhaps they ask how photography might offer new ways of seeing and thinking about the systems that define our present. Over the past few years, a key passage from Peter Osborne has guided my reflections, making me consider how easily we take the technologies that structure our lives for granted. ... the whole question of where ‘the photograph’ is, which turns out to be as difficult to answer under the conditions of chemical-based analogue images as it is under those of digitalization. Is it, for example, as ordinary language suggests, to be identified with the photographic print? Hardly, for this is (at least potentially) a multiple —although a print is one place it might be found. Is it the negative? But this is a negative or tonally inverted image (and anyway a film might remain undeveloped). Is it, then, the image captured on the photographic plate or film? After all, photographs are what one ‘takes’ —one each instance, however many prints. Yet this is, perversely, unviewable, until developed. It soon becomes clear that to ask, ‘Where is the photograph.” is the wrong question. Put simply: there is no single site of the photograph. The photograph is not the kind of thing, ontologically, that can be strictly identified in spatial terms. There is a distributive unity to ‘the’ photograph itself, as well as to the broader field of the photographic. In so far as the question can be meaningfully addressed, the photograph is distributed across the sites of its process, which it permeates as an image, de-realized (spectral), albeit in a peculiar ontological state of dependency upon the processes that it transcends, in each of its different technological forms. Hence its peculiar combination of generality and specificity. There is a direct ontological affinity here between photography and the conceptual aspect of art, which is rendered explicit in post conceptual art. For there is no fixed place of either ‘the’ photograph or the work of art. Peter Osborne: Anywhere or not at all : philosophy of contemporary art (Verso 2013) p. 124