Dark Mirror, 2005

Since 1998 Carlos Amorales has been collecting a series of digital graphics into a totality he calls Liquid Archive. Drawing upon a variety of sources such as magazines, books, the Internet, and, above all, photographs that he had taken, the artist has assembled letters of the alphabet, abstractions, images of animals, insects, trees, airplanes, portraits of people, various objects, but also dripping blood, hair, masks, and spider webs. Utilizing the technique of rotoscoping, in which the designer’s hand intervenes in a given image, Amorales simplifies the initially heterogeneous material into silhouettes and, through the use of the computer, transforms them into vectorial graphics. Precisely because it is based on images that are in reality pure mathematical sequences and can be further manipulated, the artist describes his archive as “liquid.” [...]