Byzantine gold has a peculiar way of causing the unstructured (i.e. pre-linear perspective) depth to pop out of the image, de-emphasising the figures. This kind of representational method has a strong resonance with theological narratives of the impurity and “fallen” nature of humanity. It serves as a psychological mnemonic that cultivates an ambient visual field […]
The dancing rhythm and flow of colour and form, the interdependent harmonies of narrative and depth: the presence of Christ (here) is that third perspectival point that inflates, shapes and guides another extra-dimensional space and geometry of psychology, perception and projection. Rubens cultivates a representational gravitational node that here manifests in a recursively self-propagating representational […]
Observe: the creative node in a cultural network – the artefact, the object, the concept – is never the terminal boundary of the artist’s endeavour. The contour and flow of living information systems in minds and cultures are dynamic and adaptive; the life and boundless complexity of an artefact is that cascading field of consequence […]
The extent to which we manifest or express individual self-determination in a virtualised, distributed public display of visual social-media identity-construction is simultaneously the measure of our imprisonment by that dragging anchor and inconstant vessel of Self. Self-definition is (a) freedom but it is simultaneously the persistent dragging anchor and burden of an external world, internalised […]
I am engaged in an unrelenting death-match of Greco-Roman wrestling with mobile device spell checkers. I have had some very near-misses on social media. The spell checker on my phone recently tried to insert Gestapo instead of gestalt and circumcision instead of circumlocution; needless to say – this would have dramatically re-framed the intended meaning […]
During this shared Global challenge that is the COVID-19 pandemic and now – much more than ever before – the internet is our critical information lifeline and tether to the world. How well is the internet coping with such a sudden and massive hyper-inflation of demand? The internet of popular imagination is an omnipresent amorphous […]
When so much contemporary art – as with politics and ideology – survives and thrives on a pure and insubstantial superficiality that is profoundly hollow, fragile and ultimately meaningless, this art demonstrates a deep stylistic and aesthetic value and enduring emotional, psychological impact. I truly love this work – it is evocative, alluring and conceptually, […]
Jimi Hendrix is one of those icons and representational idioms that provide a counter-cultural mnemonic eloquence. His presence is resonant with Jim Morrison, a prismatic Dark Side of the Moon, posters of Henry Fonda on his Harley in Easy Rider. The cultural nodes of these idioms are undergoing constant representational metamorphosis and this artistic thread […]
…and there we all are, withered and worn by the aggregate burden of pandemic catastrophe, political ineptitude and an endless stream of normative everyday entropy that, not only does the media present to us because this salience of shock value is the central bank of any currency of garnering attention, but which is inadvertently also […]
Beauty is such a strange sadness to a wise beholder. Truth, wrapped in youth like those blossoms that in aging inadvertently aspire to become the hollow frames or elder coccoons to which their own pattern or tapestry in time must trace an inevitable descent and unforgiving trajectory. We celebrate the flower, the spring growth and […]
Instagram, a virtual wonderland of beautiful faces and spontaneously zany lifestyles, creative activity and the broad spectrum of human positivity. A strange place, in many ways – not because all of these pastimes are particularly pointless or hollow – but because, even while the Global pandemic stalks us all and threatens to forever change this […]
Language is something of an operating system. Language also represents a self-propagating, abstract information system – much like culture or socioeconomic reality – that inhabits us just as much as we inhabit it. Human beings, technologies, artefacts and communication systems are the medium through which this linguistic entity manifests and self-replicates. The resilience of this […]
Daedelus Kite 