20/11/22’ Terrified and in love with the future.
Extending from ‘Meditations on becoming an antenna’ (initial project proposal) through the production of new works, the antenna itself seems to be pointing at transformative technologies both in concept and process, and within this, is bouncing back and forth between frequencies of the past and frequencies of the future. That is to say symbols are presenting themselves - such as an unlit fire, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and various children’s toys - which are forming conversations around an evolution of tool making and information processing. From the fire signifying the primitive tool and an evolutionary shift in creative problem solving, to the tool of fiction/ fantasy, and how it is superimposed onto the physical world through literature, performance, and consumable goods.
Works being produced are maintaining a focus on eroding this line between fiction and reality/ past and future (I am unable to distinguish if past = reality and future = fiction or if it is the other way round), and in their combination are starting to make reference to some sort of unplaceable overlap between ancient and modern transformative technologies, as if the birth of the man-made fire and the birth of the heroine signify the same energy and exist in overlapping dimensions. There is some sort of allusion to the idea that fantasy, myth and empirical reality exist on the same plane - as mere variants of information processing, and that in-fact we are already exist deeply within the amalgamation of these realities.
Through processes of dismantling the image and combining found materials with fabricated structures and first hand documents, conflicts are being produced. For example, in two untitled tray frame collages, cut-outs from a 1995 games catalogue are situated in prose with cut-outs from a book documenting crime scenes of famous serial killers. Narative images sit in situ alluding to a process of action, recording, and investigation. everything is to be considered consequential, everything is to be investigated, everything is evidence… of something, and every part inflicts action on its constituents. We see a crashed car, a man with a gun - so here is our relationship, yin and yang/ giving and receiving.
In ‘Trojan horse’ we have the mythical structure of a trojan horse, which is also the name of an insidious computer virus, presenting an ancient helmet on its front - concealing scene of a wild horse and a bungalow with 3 doors on its reverse. The militarised action is the communication, the guise - concealing a scenario of ambiguity and choice. We can think of the helmet/ militarised action, as the word/ the statement, and we can think of the concealed scene as the burden of freedom, hidden behind the word. It is a reverse trojan horse because what I consider to be the destructive element is the element being sold, and what I consider to be the sanctified is concealed - a word is a closed world and 3 doors is infinity.
In ‘Ophelia at the airport’ second hand knowledge is superimposed onto first-hand knowledge, in the combination of photographing/ printing and using found imagery. The hierarchy of information is disregarded, if not reversed, and an expression is formed between that which has come from myself and that which has come from outside myself.
Stepping further into this transformation/ or extraction of information and setting free into the world ‘Ophelia airport printout’ re-presents a detail from ‘Ophelia at the airport’ - forming a 2nd variant as would take place through an A.I de-noising diffusion model. A work responds to a work, and in this selection of detail the image most connected to my own hand (being my self-taken photograph of the unlit fire) vanishes… that is to say becomes irrelevant/ non-essential information as the expression evolves. Between these 2 works there is therefore a transition that takes place, where 2nd hand knowledge/ information from outside myself becomes essential/ kept information, and 1st hand knowledge / information from within myself becomes non-essential/ disposable information.
This is initially a warning, a reaction and a fear - however it exists as part of a process of eventual return and abandonment of the Ego. Existing as the form of learned behaviour and intellect, the Ego sits inside us like a parasite/ imposter, disguising itself as our-self. If one is not operating outside of their own ego then that person’s first-hand knowledge is in fact not theirs, it is second hand information, given through mass cultural phenomenon, adopted and disguised. To return to the self and to bypass the ego one must first travel outwards because this is the initiatory step in learning how to listen, to receive, to become an antenna. When one learns to listen and be receptive, one can return to the self and hear the story muffled by the ego, which is the story of the world itself.
Although present in all my work, between ‘Ophelia at the airport’ and ‘Ophelia airport printout’ one can see a more obvious example of departure for the sake of new return. We extract, we form distance so that we can comprehend, learn, and bring home these treasures like gatherers. We did it when we invented the camera and returned to our ways of seeing. We did it when we invented A.I and returned to our processes of selection. We do it with every art work that we extrapolate from ourselves - we make these departures to return to ourselves, and to make departures from departures is just staying on one path for a little bit longer.
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