J. Sybylla Smith In Conversation With Danielle Ezzo

Danielle Ezzo is a new media artist pioneering the lossy space of photography through a process of sourcing from the vast digitized open-access archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This beguiling book animates McLuhan's semiotic principle, the medium is the message, by activating the ability of photography to simultaneously communicate and mediate. Ezzo’s rephotographed art objects unleash an open-ended exploration into how history is shaped and its potential to propagate the future. 

In this conversation, Danielle discusses, among other things:

Viewer as curator

Non-linear looking

Intuitive response led by the aesthetics of formal qualities

Freeing artifacts of origins 

Subjectivity of documentation

Categorization matters

Lossiness

Letting go of presuppositions (aka prescribed notions)

Sensibilities change

How images circulate now

Sky as inspiration and analogous to virtual space

Reimagining artistic communities

NFT’s

Economics of being an artist

Synthetic images 

Museums' role as cultural arbiters

Cultural lag

Number Theory