Spatial Objects is the result of Dan Holdsworth’s ongoing enquiry into contemporary photographic processes, and what he calls the ‘surface interface of the image’ within today’s digital, media-saturated visual culture. In computer science, ‘spatial objects’ refer to values that exist within a specific place simultaneously in the real and the virtual spheres. As in Holdsworth’s Transmission, the starting point for Spatial Objects is geological mapping data of the American West. But while in Transmission the resulting images echoed both nineteenth-century and ‘new-topographic’ photographic languages, Spatial Objects draws on the vocabulary of Minimalist sculptural practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Holdsworth transposes aerially scanned scientific data of geological landscapes into 3D virtual models, working deep within the material to explore the architecture of the virtual. Going beyond the limits of representation, what we see in these works are the edges and fragments of the pixel resolved within the geometry of the interface itself, transformed into structures of pure colour and light.

Dan Holdsworth, born 1976 in Welwyn Garden City, holds a BA Hons Photography from the University of The Arts London.