Featured Artist

Each year we feature a selection of works by a digital artist, which informs the visual identity for the award. We are pleased to welcome Shaheer Tarar as the 2020 EDAA Featured Artist. His new series “ASCII World” will be showcased throughout the website, as well as on other materials for the 2020 award 

Shaheer Tarar, ASCII World (2020)

Javascript, Archival Footage

In our lifetime, we experience only a fraction of the world with our own senses. As a result, much of our understanding of the world, of the places we’ve never been and the things we’ve never seen, is shaped by the pictures and videos we view on our screens. To remind us that these images are only digital representations, ASCII World takes the raw color values which make up each pixel of each image and interprets them as information interchange code. The resulting images still show the forms of their original subjects, but their algorithmic makeup amplifies the fact that each place and object shown in the images is ultimately an array of pixels and set of instructions on how to render them.

Shaheer Tarar

Shaheer Tarar uses satellite images, found footage and legal documents to trace historical events to the role they play in the contemporary moment. He pursues stories buried by time, space and code—studying artifacts from these stories that still remain and mediate our relationship to the past. These studies are presented as publications, websites, large prints or multi-channel films.