Programming harmony touching clear sky

A green-hued image of the Mojave desert supplies a portrait of machine vision. As we approach Programming harmony touching clear sky (2024), the composition loses coherence, resolving into a grid of hand-painted pixels. The painting belongs to a series based on digital images of landscapes in distress, recorded by CCTV cameras. […] Up close, viewers are presented with both the construction of an image as a digital system, and—intellectually speaking—a diminished approximation of the real situation. Troika thus supplies a ‘critical optic’. […] The history of painting offers a record of how human perception changes in dialogue with scientific and technological developments. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty discerned in the paintings of Paul Cézanne an alternative departure to Impressionism, informed by psychology and phenomenology. He attempted to paint the “impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.” The lived experience of perception does not conform to what optics predicts, for sense impressions are ordered within the mind according to a different logic than that of a machine. Troika’s paintings show the object in the act of appearing not to our eyes, but to that of a digital camera. In so doing, the artists excavate the performative impact of digital-imaging devices upon human apprehension and comprehension. Are we coming to see the world through machine eyes? Do new operating systems render old ways of seeing obsolete?

– Dehlia Hannah