Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 1
It was pouring down with rain on a Friday night in Perth, and I wanted to watch something mindless on television. I had bought a new antenna but it didn’t work
properly, so the video signal kept dropping out. Too tired to reach for the remote, I became hypnotised by the video compression errors on the TV. Pixels and liquefied forms darted and wormed their way across the screen; coloured blocks and bars erratically formed and disappeared, and digital artifacts merged and collided in a fragmented video collage.
That night, I dreamt about all the faces I had seen on the TV. The eyes of presenters from telemarketing commercials appeared to melt. News reporters burst into mosaics of glitches. Retro video game-esque shapes danced on top of politicians’ cheeks. When I tuned in again, I recreated these transmission errors and took pictures of different parts of scrambled video footage as it was undergoing a process of transformation in real time. After many months of doing this, I had witnessed bewitching noses jut out of ink black nothingness, razor-toothed men leer in digital limbo, and blocky, morphing faces squawk like exotic birds. I aim to materialise this strange abstract world in the form of concrete photographic documents, and to allow viewers to create their own narratives from the work.
I see my approach to photography as a way to catalogue anomalous entities that inhabit these realms. As a photographer, I am a hunter and an archaeologist,
searching through disintegrating video broadcasts for new entities to immortalise. I categorise these entities in three ways. An entity may have an undocumented existence (I witnessed an entity’s existence but did not get to take its picture), an entity may have a documented existence (I both witnessed and have photographic evidence of the entity), and an entity may have potential existence as something that could materialise in a video landscape containing infinite possibilities, a landscape that is not governed by logic or reason. Since there are so many potential entities to document, this creates a fear of missing out.
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 2
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 3
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 4
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 5
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 6
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 7
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 8
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 9
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 10
Fear of Missing Out: Untitled # 11
In his series Fear of Missing Out, Australian photomedia artist Darren Tynan documents video compression errors using broadcasts from free-to-air Australian
television channels. By intercepting broadcast signals, Tynan explores transmission glitches as a serendipitous phenomenon and as a creative tool in the photographic process. A project spanning two years, FoMO is a world punctuated by randomness, disintegration and transmutation.
About the artist:
Darren Tynan is a photographer from Perth, Western Australia. 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. Tynan’s photographic works have featured in various exhibitions in Vietnam, China and
Australia. As an artist, he explores serendipity as a generative device and uses broadcast transmission errors as a creative tool in the photographic process.