ABOUT : Céphéide is simultaneously a machine, an experience and a deeply photographic process. A machine to make the digital image tangible, an experience of photography over time, and a process that echoes the history of a too-long considered secondary art form.

 

Céphéide may, at first glance, appear digital in its construction. In truth, behind the algorithms and the whirring of motors, lies a magic of the earth, an organic mystery: phosphorescence.

 

Pixel by pixel, electrons in the phosphorescent pigment become energised, re-emitting the signal that has been transmitted to them. Once the first image appears, a slow cycle of dissipation and excitation of the luminous material is set in motion. An ephemeral vanishing image dialogues with an appearing one before giving way to it.

The thin line between the latent analog image and the ever-fleeting digital image gets blurred with every scan.

 

The Céphéide experience is set in darkness. The very darkness that was, for over a century, an essential and inherent component of photography. Camerae obscurae, darkrooms, sheets thrown over photographers' heads... With the advent of digital technology, the sensations associated with the mastering of darkness have been lost. Céphéide reintroduces this component into a digital experience of the medium.

 

This new photographic process is imperfect, monochrome... As with salt paper, carbon prints or polaroid, which have contributed, in their time, to the consideration of photography as an art form; it is the transfiguration of reality by Céphéide, in all its digital mechanics, that makes it fascinating.

 

At the crossroads of digital and tangible image, Amandine Besacier and Graphset invite us to rediscover the fragility and imperfection of the photosensitive process.