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My friend Ben approached me with the idea of compiling a release for my techno-oriented netlabel, Drumlore, so of course I said “yes”! We threw a few concepts around before settling on Techgnosis, an obvious tribute to the work of Erik Davis, but also a fitting name for Ben’s particular brand of deep, mystic techno.

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Inspired by my adventures in digitally restoring found negatives I set out to imitate the look and feel of physical film, introducing noise and warping and blurring various components of the design to give it more of a human touch. Initially I was working with muted sepia tones but switched to greyscale about halfway through and never looked back.

I think it should be obvious why I might use film as a visual metaphor for gnosis. The “knowledge” contained within the image is already present in the negative—but a technological transformation is required to expose the film and bring the image to life.

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Both frames are a combination of two original photos, one each from an abandoned hospital in Tainan and an abandoned woodworking plant in Nantou. Here is an inverted copy showing more of the original detail in each frame:

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And here are the two frames cut to size with text removed:

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Finally, just for fun, here’s some lo-fi experiments with the original source material:

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