"piTTSburgh engineer" By David Tinapple.

Life as experienced through digital technology can seem subtly estranged from what used to be real reality, leaving our analog sensory equipment dazed, clicking like an old eight-track. In a remarkably short period of time contemporary photography, whether of the breaking news, fine arts or family fun variety, has become almost entirely a matter of binary code and software. Already film is just about obsolete, but that's the least of it; in terms of the total information it provides, human eyesight is also out of date.

David Tinapple and Adri Wichert are photographers who explore the potential of this new reality, proposing visions of a world understood as a complex equation of information and interpretation. Using software he designed himself, Tinapple builds full-length digital portraits of ordinary-looking people, who nevertheless look ever so slightly fake, like effigies of themselves. They give an impression of extraordinary stillness, perhaps because the focal length of Tinapple's SLR flattens his images; but also seem texturally wrong, like a figure at Madame Tussaud's: something between literally waxen and just plain dead.

To produce these works Tinapple, who completed his postgraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University and currently teaches courses in digital media art at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, built a device that raised his camera one small step at a time to produce 100 separate images of Pittsburg engineers who posed for him. In each case the process took 60 seconds so we can assume there's some very slight residual motion made by the subjects themselves; here and there the edge of a pant leg, for instance, frays a little, breaking down into short triangular shards. But the real disconnect is visible in the background, where objects are seen at more widely varying angles, producing a stacked, Italian futurist effect. That the subjects themselves are also stacked, as if sliced in 100 pieces, is not quite visible to the naked eye but becomes an important, vaguely morbid consideration as one views these strange images.

In another project Tinapple photographed every face that appeared on 10 major networks, from MTV to PBS, during a 24-hour period, then used software to produce a composite of each. The results are unsettling. They're blurry, since they combine many different angles and hairstyles as well as both genders and all races, but remarkably coherent considering that each is composed of hundreds of faces. Perhaps it also makes sense that the finished products look much alike. Harder to explain is the fact that, as Front Room Gallery owner Paul Sobota observed, "They all look something like George Bush."

The game of using multiple photographic studies to create composite portraits of certain ethnic or alleged "class" phenotypes dates back to the late decades of the 19th century when British scientist Francis Galton made a number of such studies, supporting prejudices of the period. Around the same time his fellow countryman Eadweard Muybridge, famously one of the principal initiators of what was to become cinema, had also experimented with multiple images, using them to analyze motion. The long-term effects of such early efforts are incalculable, impacting everything from Nazi fictional medical morphology to Warhol's various portrait series - and even everyday life at YouTube. Recently New York photographer Noah Kalina posted a composite, serial self-portrait on that overwhelmingly popular site assembled from the daily pics he made of himself from 2000-06. It's fascinating partly because of the occasionally quite extreme changes in style or demeanor we see Kalina go through, and Tinapple's movie version of his network faces is visually exciting in a similar way. The blurry composites give way to a galloping montage of hundreds of faces, reflecting states of mind and circumstances that almost register as social or psychological information but are quickly swept away in the onrush of facial features.

Recent Cleveland Institute of Art graduate Adri Wichert's sculpture/photography focuses on everyday life and events, and the surfaces that surround and preoccupy both the human eye and the digitized lens of her digital camera. At last year's BFA exhibits at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Wichert installed the group of three-dimensional, close-to-life-size figures now on view at Front Room. At first glance these appear to have stepped out of a cubist painting, but in fact they were patched together from hundreds of glossy digital prints. Her basically lighthearted subjects remembering family events have a slight edge of drama, as in the work "When My Mom Rolled My Dog's Head Up in the Window." Here the family car is tabletop size, with Mom visible through the windshield and Adri herself yelling from a side window. On the other side of the car the dog is seen howling in protest. Influenced by Korean artist Osang Gwon, who has been building 3D photo sculptures since 1998, and by well-known New York performance-oriented artist Jeremy Wolff who also owes a debt to Osang in some of his work, Wichert strikes out on her own stylistically, changing focus rapidly to create portraits of family members as if seen from several different distances simultaneously. Her technique concentrates on textures and surfaces that might seem incidental to her overall stories, like the greatly enlarged nap of a piece of carpet spreading out from the edges of a strangely foreshortened, distorted couch and table, or warped game controllers. Wichert's subjects include the nature of memory, of our awareness of intimate details surrounding minor peaks and valleys of everyday life and emotion. Her work also provides an account of how current technology tends to flatten and alter the perception of every surface in our lives, potentially changing our sensual capability, if not the nature of things themselves.

David Tinapple and Adri Wichert
Through Dec. 15
Front Room Gallery
3615 Superior Ave., St. 4203
216.534.6059