artist (alphabetic) statement:

2D space in linear time

 

surprising expectation : a visual thesis

 

This project began as an exploration of the concept of sublime within visual art.  As concept, it certainly was elusive at best.  As my studies progressed, my paradigm advanced that the meaning of sublime has evolved over time.

Now I narrowed the scope of my study to include only visual art presented in a two-dimensional frame; like a painting or a photograph or a film or video.  I soon reached the conclusion that meaningfulness changes as artists come to embrace new media.  That is, what was sublime in the 12^th Century might be a painting that is more iconographic than representational or perspective-based (from our present vantage). By the early 20^th Century, visual artists were Surrealists, Pointillists and Cubists.  Images with color and media were paintings and collages that left 3D perspectivism to the progeny of the camera obscura, the Kodak and its brethren.  Painting became less concerned with representing what one might call truth-reality or witness and more concerned with the act of vision and, perhaps, the artist’s psychic state of being.  The representation integrated the creation and display of process; that is, the formal content incorporated the creative process itself and presented imagic art.

As a chef watching a reduction simmer, I grokked that it all came down to language games; language as agreed-upon meaning created to communicate. But there was more to it.

If alphabetic characters (letters) are graphical representations of sounds, then just as a sequence of sounds forms a word, sequences of words are intentions to represent thoughts and concepts in a most abstract fashion. As reading and writing expanded to the common populace, abstract thinking literally grew the human brain to embrace time, space and causality as concepts Euclidean and Newtonian (Shlain).

While the methodology is left-to-right (Western culture) sequencing of abstractions to communicate something that may or may not refer to anything thing-like {more metaphor),  human understanding of this sequencing is based on a linear timeline paradigm postulated by a more mechanistic society of the late millenium.

This is in complete contrast to the more cyclical understanding of time that humans conceptualized in centuries of prehistory upon finding a pattern in the movements of the moon. (I would suggest that this is perhaps what Fredrich Nietzsche asserted with his concept of eternal recurrence; loops and cycles manifest instead of a straight line stretching from past to future points.)

But clearly, the language of communication that evolved from the alphabet and mechanized printing has been left far behind at a 4th-dimensional train station.  There is a new additional, related language; a language of photographic imagery, with referents and nuance, and it is becoming more sophisticated every day. The assumption that this imagery supplies a referent to that-which-is-before the camera (Barthes) at the very least belies the compression of three dimensions into two. (Imputing perspective is learned, hence the graphics appearing on this page.) And observe that the new language has its very technic in reading and writing that uses the alphabetic symbology learned in elementary school.  This structure promotes narrative structure from the oral tradition of communication, which is most grounded in metaphor. This is intention in sequence to present a story.

My thesis DVD is designed to examine underlying assumptions in an effort to illuminate the palpable complacency that a viewer brings to the apprehension of photography and film/video. It is full of loops and cycles. Some are simply video wall paintings with no narrative intention to the sequencing whatsoever. Other presentations may imply narrative to the uninoculated.

The visual (meta)phor here is the mobius naught; a mobius strip Gordian knot.

Simply put, we bring the expectation of narrative to our awake experience. And we process our visual experience as a consequence of that projection/expectation based upon our memory of former sequences.  Human memory seems formed of the alphabetic and, more recently, the photographic sequences we observe as we grow and age.

From these impressions, our cultural metanarratives may be reiterated or rebutted. With the world wide web as an ever-expanding electronic information generator, computer typography and digital photography multiply our knowledge base at a pace exponentially quickening.  We access through electronic windows most of the combined knowledge and art of the last 5000 years of the human race.

So sublime.

 

***

notes on the production of this dvd:

Many of the longer clips of music were sampled from the radioioambient streaming channel on iTunes. Stephani was recorded from the radio playing in the car sequence; I do have the CD. I also own the Sinatra CD.

The following is a list of artists and works:

777, "Dr. Livingston I Presume." System 7.3: Fire + Water. Astralwerks, 1995.

Blue Planet. "Full Moon." Blue Flame Records, 2000.

Matt Coldrick. "Green Heart Contentment." Music for a Busy Head. n.d.

Peter Gabriel. "Sketchpad with Trumpet and Voice." Birdy. Sony Pictures, 1984.

Industrial Suicide Tribe. Aqua Sufi, 2001.

Joint Intelligence Committee.  Ed Wood. n.d.

Daniel Lanois. "White Mustang II." Arcadie. 2002.

Mood Swings. "Storm in a Teacup@135 Degrees." Water Music Records, 2002

Phutureprimitive. . "Rites of Passage." Subconscious. Waveform Records, 2004

Frank Sinatra. "Summer Wind." The Very Good Years. Reprise, 1991.

Space Safari. "Smoke." Soul. free form, n.d.

John Stanford. "Sea of Tranquility." White Cloud, 1999.

Gwen Stephani. Rock Steady. Interscope Records, 2001.

Users Atmosphere. Endspiel. The Real Ambient Mix. Wohnton, 2000.

Zero Ohms. "Ocean of Mercy." Surfaces. Orchard, n.d.

Shorter clips of sound were produced by me using garageband and garageband2.

Other software used: 

dvd studio pro 3   final cut pro 1- HD    livetype    motion    after effects   premiere pro  premiere  quicktime pro    word    dreamweaver   idvd      photoshop     iphoto    bridge   compressor    imovie    itunes      wiretap      flash    toast     soundsoap     isadora      bryce 1-5

*** there are no gray spots at the corners of the squares.     the rows of black and white squares are all parallel.     impossible triangle.       the center circles are both the same size.       three-prong fork.     ambiguous cubes