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Complex Connections
90cm x 97cm
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Artist Statement: Digital abstractions Ð complex connections ...
Referencing details from various graphical user interfaces, these prints form a
series of works that abstract onscreen imagery and reverse the usual input-output
process physical to digital, by taking from the digital and making physical. Taking
inspiration from the inherently multiple (digital source material) and remediating
this as a physical, one-off or limited edition print, the images address the notion
of Walter Benjamin's "aura of the original" and examine the implications for
originality and physical representation for artworks in a "post-real" digital age.
A dramatic change in scale and location (computer screen to gallery wall) is
another important aspect of the work. Viewed out of context and away from the
usual intimacy of the screen, the images can (still) trigger the memory of a
familiar, ubiquitous monitor interface. The artworks begin to utilise these same
visual elements to refer to the "human condition" applied to a digital context.
Narratives and distinctively human comments are constructed from the visual
building blocks of the digital environment, a place where we are increasingly
spending our time and energies.
As the boundaries and reference points between physically and digitally grounded
imagery become less defined, the duality of the interplay moves toward a more
seamless self-referencing and continuous activity. A visual feedback loop, where
the clues of originality become increasingly hard to differentiate and, perhaps,
increasingly irrelevant. By extracting the real-world metaphors from the digital
environment and taking them back into the physical world, the works become a
kind of hyper-mediated simulacrum.
Ian Gwilt is an adjunct fellow in computer graphic design at Waikato University,
School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, New Zealand, and a visiting
lecturer in visual communications at the University of Technology Sydney,
Department of Design Architecture and Building, Australia. |
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