In Dack’s CCTV #2, an image of architectural structures lit by the aquatic green of night vision footage is interrupted by a series of striated glitches that transform the camera’s indifferent eye into an aesthetic device – an interpreter, not a transcriber. That Dack’s source images employ the unblinking eye of political authority as tokens of an archive of power (missile tests, police helicopters) makes his inversions of fidelity discreetly subversive.
The conversion involved – from a disembodied image on a screen to a laboriously printed object – is part of Dack’s elegant reversal of the photograph’s function, the virtual estranged, made real.