Soon every facet of human life will be digitized. In Rembrandt Quiballo’s newest body of work, he imagines the possible remnants of our existing digital culture. While traditional archaeologists excavate the earth to find evidence of long-lost civilizations, Quiballo’s solo show “Artifact” explores what future scientists could discover when they mine our ever-expanding digital cloud.
Through the use of datamoshing and glitch techniques, Quiballo generates digital artifacts within images found in mass media such as film, television, and the Internet. The prevalence of data compression today makes this loss of information inherent in our everyday images. We want unsurpassed quality but with the least expenditure of resources. The mere transfer of data causes the contemporary image to be in a constant state of decay. In our pursuit to produce and consume an endless stream of visuals, we face complications such as finite data space and visual incongruity. In the meantime, a new kind of imagery emerges. Quiballo’s images invite the viewer to imagine the leavings of our dominant form of cultural archives transfigured by time – our lives obscured and lacking the details we take for granted. What is lost, and what will be assumed in those missing spaces? Past, present and future meet in these artifacts of life.
Rembrandt Quiballo is a visual artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. Quiballo was born in the city of Manila in the Philippines. Social and political unrest in the Philippines compelled his family to leave the country, eventually immigrating to the United States. Quiballo received a BFA in Painting and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Arizona. He earned his MFA in Photography at Arizona State University in 2012. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally including Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Cairo and Berlin. Quiballo is the recipient of numerous wards, including the ASU GPSA Research Grant, the SPE Student Award, the Nathan Cummings Travel Fellowship and the Contemporary Forum Emerging Artist Grant. Through the moving image, his work explores mass media and its effects on social and political history.
“Artifact” will open on January 17, 2020 and run through February 21, 2020.