by Işık Kaya (Photographer), Thomas Georg Blank (Photographer), Işık Kaya (Author)
With the uprise of mobile devices, the infra-structural needs of the telecommunication industry have exploded, and since the 1980s, cell towers have started to fill the planet. The scenery changed dramatically when an antenna was transformed into an artificial pine tree for the first time in 1992. Since then, this kind of camouflage has evolved into a global phenom-enon that raises fundamental questions about the relationship between humans and nature. The images from the series Second Nature focus on cell tower trees that became part of the Southern California landscape. The series depicts these artefacts of the digital age as, in Amy Clarke's words, a societal preference for >fakeugly
Author Biography
Thomas Georg Blank, born 1990 in Germany, was first trained in cultural and media education focusing on photography before studying art in Karlsruhe and Mexico City. Moving between research and speculative interpretations, Blank explores how spatial and habitual representations of individual and collective imagination affect the world we're living in and vice versa. By creating multidirectional, spatial narratives he offers spectators a space for reconfiguration and change of perspective. He currently resides in Los Angeles and has had several exhibitions in galleries and museums, including Hek Basel, Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Kunstverein Pforzheim, Blue Star Contemporary and C/O Berlin. His works have been awarded many times and he has been a scholar of DAAD as a research fellow at UC San Diego's Center for Human Imagination.