Aldous Huxley wrote eloquently about what is certainly a universal desire to transcend ordinary human experience—and which is also the compulsion driving both religious mysticism and image-making. In The Doors of Perception, first published in 1954, he relays his own experience with mescaline, the hallucinogenic alkaloid produced by peyote. Known as “the book that launched a thousand trips,” The Doors of Perception became a seminal text among Timothy Leary and the American hippies. Thomas Ruff’s new “d.o.pe.” series is named after Huxley’s book, and the images of fractals folding back on themselves, tessellating into infinity, do superficially resemble the visual hallucinations that Huxley describes as well as the psychedelic art that became a mainstay of 1960s counterculture.
Yet Ruff’s project is much more than an exploration of altered consciousness. These new works look back to his earliest days as a photographer and the kind of fantastical imagery he enjoyed as a teenager in southern Germany. For over forty years, Ruff’s work has been characterized as an investigation into photographic objectivity. His “d.o.pe.” works are rich with new forms of possibility. Algorithmically generated as a series of Mandelbrot sets (a basic fractal named after an IBM engineer), they extend his long-standing interest in photographic computation. Photographs made the objectification of our entire world possible, and image-generating algorithms (not unlike the ones that Ruff uses in this series) are now at work cataloguing, modeling, and predicting entirely new swathes of human experience. “As Ruff examines the historic and contemporary tools of technical images,” writes Duncan Wooldridge in an essay on the series, “he presents how images and computational technology subtly give shape to the world that is about to be.”