Agate Tūna’s artwork, Techno-Spectre, challenges the familiar landscape of photography, immersing viewers in a fascinating cosmos where historical interpretations of capturing the unseen intertwine with the connection between photography, spirituality, and technology.

The artwork, Techno-Spectre, metaphorically refers to the digital footprints that people leave in the virtual environment. They can be trivial, like saved website data, or more visible, like social media posts, which can continue to “haunt” our online personas long after they’re created. From archived emails to online interactions and comments, our collective digital existence spreads across the vast electrical spectrum of the web. This network, performing countless data updates and save functions every day, is home to a vast “ghost” dwelling. The ghost, a recurring motif in the author’s artistic activity, embodies the continuous practice of capturing and depicting the elusive in photography. Meanwhile, the experimental photography technique used, chemigrams, resembles a carefully performed magic trick, capturing a photo without a camera. Like a magic trick, the power of photography lies not only in the final image but also in the process of its creation, which is as complex and multifaceted as the images it produces.

Central to the artwork is the use of chemigrams, created on photosensitive paper with a photo fixer and developer. Merging photography with drawing, she manipulates photosensitive paper both chemically and physically, scratching, folding, painting, and making marks to introduce another dimension of expression. Later, the images are printed on aluminum (dibond), giving the material a new layer of materiality. By bending the surface of the aluminum (dibond), the image, initially constrained within a two-dimensional frame, begins to capture a three-dimensional world. The resulting artwork captures the ebb and flow between the artist’s control and the unpredictable reactions of the chemicals, culminating in a captivating interplay between precision and chaos.