symbiotic beings

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In "FIBER I" (2024) and "FIBER II" (2024), Justin Urbach combines analog and digital techniques to reflect mechanisms of perception that have changed as a result of altered viewing habits through display worlds and digital environments. Using precise laser engraving and UV printing, he transfers an analog photograph – which can be seen in the wall sculpture "FIBER NERVE" (2024) as an illuminated image in the outdoor space – onto steel and handmade paper, emphasizing their material properties. In this process, the motif is abstracted and removed from its original context. Like a shadow of the analog origin, the fine relief is inscribed into the hard and soft surface of the steel and paper. Image and support thus combine and create a unity in which analog photography and mechanized transfer become a hybrid form. "FIBER II" can be understood as a further gradation in which UV printing on the metal is used as an additional process to continue the superimposition and abstraction of the motif. The transformation of analog media into digital and back into the physical describes the everyday presence of media through screens in indoor and outdoor spaces. The motif of the abstracted photograph shows a man standing in front of an oversized LED screen in New York's Times Square and makes us aware of this entanglement. "FIBER I" and "FIBER II" appear like analog images of screens, like afterimages of visual stimuli with which Urbach examines questions of mediality, transformation processes and hybridity.