Michael Najjar - High Altitude

Najjar chose the summit of Aconcagua as the location for his "High Altitude" work series and photographed the material in the course of three weeks to form the basis of the series.

Created between 2008 and 2010 the series visualizes the development of the leading global stock market indices over the past 20-30 years. The virtual 'data mountains' of the stock market charts are re-sublimated in the craggy materiality of the Argentinean mountainscape.

Just like the indices, mountains too have a timeline, their own biography. The rock formations soaring skywards with its many layered folds, show unmeasurable time on any human scale. The immediate reality of nature thus becomes a virtual experience.

Such experience of virtuality is strikingly exemplified by the global economic and financial system. If the focus used to be on the exchange of goods an commodities, it is now securely on the exchange of immaterial information.

The information society has brought about a tectonic shift in our understanding of space and time. Humankind is confronted with a process of such dynamic complexity that the borderlines we seemingly identify at one moment are already sublimated in the next. In the future the virtual value system could demand its proper reincarnation in the real world.

The jagged rock formations of "High Altitude" are emblematic of the thin edge separating reality and simulation.