MoMA’s Baby

MAK – Museum for Applied Arts, Vienna

In his multipart installation work MoMA's Baby (2019-2022), Bizumic focuses on the exchange between analog and digital photographic technologies. In connection with AI's ability to "see", i.e. to recognise images, the artist became interested in the American engineer Russell A. Kirsch, who developed the first image scanner while working at the National Bureau of Standards in 1957. 

The point of departure for Bizumic's a photographic studio-based essay is an interview with art historian Joan Levin Kirsch, Kirsch's wife, who worked at MoMA New York and whose art historical research greatly inspired and influenced her husband's inventions but received very little attention. 

Alongside images of Kirsches and their son Walden, whose portrait as a four-month-old baby, was the first image ever digitised, Bizumic intersperses gelatine silver and chromogenic analog photographs of his Vienna studio with digital from his ALBUM series made by his fungi infested scanner. These seemingly abstract pictures push the scanner to its limits by scanning framing glass, fragments of vases, or camera lenses causing the uncontrolled light from the apparatus to refract the photographic process itself. In relationship to one another, these artworks provide a layer of "metadata" surrounding the artist's work revealing the unseen aspects of photography and its historical background.