Key concepts
My digital, visual work deals primarily with the concept of metamorphosis.
Everything is changing. Or in the words of Heraclites who famously commented on the inability to step into the same river twice (since the river and the stepper both change between events) everything flows. It’s a shame that this particular imagery has become a something of a cultural cliché. The metaphysics of flow and metamorphosis reveals that assumptions about fixed form, concept, category, hierarchy, are often just that – assumptions, or prescriptions. Convenient abstractions based on utility.
The basis for the majority of my visual work is to experiment with this underlying quality of fluid materiality and fluid conceptual attachments.
These concepts pervade both my visual and scholarly work, and are relevant to;
- Visual transformation
- Embracing the evolution of technologies and the sociotechnical sphere
- Evolution of self and its impermanence within an impermanent context
- The contradictions of creativity within procedural techno-rationalism
- The future of ‘work’ in the creative arts (and society)
Metamorphosis and the ability to work with and inhabit the ‘fourth state’ of materiality that Eisenstein termed the ‘plasmatic’ inhabits all of my digital work in some way.
Materials, processes, media
My work is primarily in the digital/visual mode, though a background in physical craft and design is still an aspect of my life and work. I use digital sculpture, modeling, animation, generative ML platforms and immersive media.
In my work, Animation provides the opportunity not only for the magic of motion, performance or narrative, but for the obliteration of form, and the detachment and of form from concept. I work primarily with the animation of volumes through digital sculpture, which marries craft and digital production, but also in immersive media, static and 2D art and animation, all of which can inhabit overlapping production spaces.
I am well versed in typical 3D animation production processes. While these pipelines themselves are always evolving, they are currently undergoing a particularly radical metamorphosis, as various aspects of the pipeline are revolutionized by automation, machine learning and real time rendering. I embrace this change. We face an age of exponential data creation which is available to technology based arts, and the prospect of exponential technologies replacing linear technologies. This seems to be a meta-plasmatic occurrence, a transformation and lack of stability (pardon the pun) of media platforms.
In contrast, I also make physical objects of utility, including instruments, tools and other objects. Thus, there is a spectrum of work from physical to digital, including efforts that combine the two (such as projection installation, computer aided manufacture and so on).
