Trompe-l’oeil is clever but, beyond immediate aesthetic effects and technical mastery, is really just the specific instance of a generalised principle of deception by which an artist fools our gullible brains into suspending their disbelief in the reality with which we are presented. The presence of a logical depth is in this way emphasised by […]
The form and flow of culture forms in no small measure the persistent expression of an introspective neurosis. The abstractions of convention, of time and place are small and hollow. A thousand years from now, everything we now hold to be self-evident will be unveiled as rank absurdity but taboo will, like the ball being […]
The extent to which we are all merely self-propagating soliton-like saliences in a rippling probabilistic field of information and energy remains largely unexplored but fertile for investigation.
Can algorithms successfully encode for the stochastic properties and endemic entropy that provides sentience with evolutionary intelligence and a bias towards novelty and (information) entropy? There are logical (and philosophical) limits to algorithmic compression or optimisation that biology has nevertheless successfully exploited, not by removing errors but – from genetics to intelligence – by capitalising […]
It is such a natural experience to us that we hardly notice our almost total suspension of disbelief in the artifice of form, volume and depth. Would a 15th Century mind experience this image the same way we do? Our world is awash with visual representation in ways that Early-Renaissance Europe undoubtedly was not. While […]
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, […]
Daedelus Kite 