Making Sense
Making Sense
This piece is about meaning, not just meaning of verbal language, nor of plastic language, but meaning broadly speaking. It is my contention that meaning is the process of constructing associations between fragmented experiences that satisfy certain relational criteria. This piece is about identity as subsequent to meaning. It is also, of course, about fuzzing the distinction between image and reality. Ultimately, this piece is about pieces; this piece is about this.
Let me begin - but you already began! Then let me say 'let me begin..' - by saying that there is no way to present this work in its entirety online: this work is an installation and can only be grasped in its entirety as a material arrangement - the medium is hard to define (a common feature of transmedia art): whilst I am using projection, this is not a simple projection: the screen is only a part of the locus of the work. The projector, the computer, the cables are all part of the installation - the mirror interface might be the mediator, does that make it the medium? This work is image as object and object as image, not one or the other - which makes a presentation of it in images so poor that I'm forced to resort to my old enemy, words, to describe it.
This work is about mediation. The mediation between self and world - it is my opinion that that is where our conscious selves reside: in between worlds. We are not our bodies but the interpretation of the effects of experience on our bodies - we are a higher level monitoring process, with power to intervene, to varying degrees, in the lower level processes we monitor. We are a complex dynamic tension between fragments - we are the inventors of coherence, or rather, we are (imperfect) coherence - the whole idea of identity is our own invention. To spend too much time focussed on our internal processing of data is to forget the data itself, which is also our self. It is a mistake to think that we can know ourselves by looking exclusively inwards (even if 'outwards' may be considered an illusion, it nonetheless exists, as much as anything can).
Technically: I wrote a text on the subject of meaning as a construction (comparable to what I just wrote above - so pretty unreadable in the first place (; ). This text is presented fullscreen on computer, then sent to a projector (set to only show via projector, so that the computer screen is black - I may use a tower computer with no screen rather than the artifice of forcing the screen black). The projector beams the image onto a mass of broken mirrors, which reflect it, exploded, onto an irregular screen. The words on screen are upside-down and mirrored, as well as broken to pieces - making it pretty much impossible to read, though some words remain legible, offering some insight as to the themes of the text. One word is 'stolen' using two carefully placed mirrors: 'this'. Instead of being reflected directly onto the screen, it is reflected onto another mirror, then through the cables of the computer and projector back onto the screen - turning it the 'right' way round and enlarging the font, whilst kris-crossing it with the shadows of the cables.
Biographically: I was a researcher in philosophy (how did you guess?) at Edinburgh University but became unconvinced of the feasibility of looking at language using language. So I moved to Belgium and (to cut a long story short) went to art school.
(Yes I know, for someone who claims not to like words, I sure use a lot of them! No, in fact the problem is that I like words too much - I'm trying, unsuccessfully perhaps, to quit - or at least to diversify my addictions).
This latest development in my work is finally, I think, an extremely effective meshing together of my philosophical and artistic work. Thanks to the TAMAT in Tournai for providing me the research grant that is bearing such fruit.
Let me begin - but you already began! Then let me say 'let me begin..' - by saying that there is no way to present this work in its entirety online: this work is an installation and can only be grasped in its entirety as a material arrangement - the medium is hard to define (a common feature of transmedia art): whilst I am using projection, this is not a simple projection: the screen is only a part of the locus of the work. The projector, the computer, the cables are all part of the installation - the mirror interface might be the mediator, does that make it the medium? This work is image as object and object as image, not one or the other - which makes a presentation of it in images so poor that I'm forced to resort to my old enemy, words, to describe it.
This work is about mediation. The mediation between self and world - it is my opinion that that is where our conscious selves reside: in between worlds. We are not our bodies but the interpretation of the effects of experience on our bodies - we are a higher level monitoring process, with power to intervene, to varying degrees, in the lower level processes we monitor. We are a complex dynamic tension between fragments - we are the inventors of coherence, or rather, we are (imperfect) coherence - the whole idea of identity is our own invention. To spend too much time focussed on our internal processing of data is to forget the data itself, which is also our self. It is a mistake to think that we can know ourselves by looking exclusively inwards (even if 'outwards' may be considered an illusion, it nonetheless exists, as much as anything can).
Technically: I wrote a text on the subject of meaning as a construction (comparable to what I just wrote above - so pretty unreadable in the first place (; ). This text is presented fullscreen on computer, then sent to a projector (set to only show via projector, so that the computer screen is black - I may use a tower computer with no screen rather than the artifice of forcing the screen black). The projector beams the image onto a mass of broken mirrors, which reflect it, exploded, onto an irregular screen. The words on screen are upside-down and mirrored, as well as broken to pieces - making it pretty much impossible to read, though some words remain legible, offering some insight as to the themes of the text. One word is 'stolen' using two carefully placed mirrors: 'this'. Instead of being reflected directly onto the screen, it is reflected onto another mirror, then through the cables of the computer and projector back onto the screen - turning it the 'right' way round and enlarging the font, whilst kris-crossing it with the shadows of the cables.
Biographically: I was a researcher in philosophy (how did you guess?) at Edinburgh University but became unconvinced of the feasibility of looking at language using language. So I moved to Belgium and (to cut a long story short) went to art school.
(Yes I know, for someone who claims not to like words, I sure use a lot of them! No, in fact the problem is that I like words too much - I'm trying, unsuccessfully perhaps, to quit - or at least to diversify my addictions).
This latest development in my work is finally, I think, an extremely effective meshing together of my philosophical and artistic work. Thanks to the TAMAT in Tournai for providing me the research grant that is bearing such fruit.
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