The art of Leonardo Vargas invokes the ghost of Francis Bacon’s disturbing vision but arguably finds itself arriving in an altogether different aesthetic solution to a representation of human identity and the psychological dissonance of individuation.
Information encoding for message transmission is a function expressed in (and as) visual culture and which evolves over time.
Most of that which is “you” may not actually be you at all. What is original about you is the choices you make concerning the reconfiguration of preexisting things, concepts, objects, words, idioms and methods of self-expression.
The underlying momentum of evolving material logics, symmetries and information systems seem already oriented towards incurring dissonance, difference and entropy as an autonomous method through which their own accelerated logical metamorphosis self-propagates.
An epigenetic self-replication of the spiritual void, manifest as cultural entities in the contemporary Chinese art of Mi Qiaoming.
In this painting of the “human Barbie doll”, Swiss artist Stefania Pinsone reflects the self-conscious self-replication of culture, self and art itself. The painting is titled “Valeria Lukyanova (white noise)”.
It requires humility to acknowledge that your own ostensibly unique personality, conceptual vocabulary and social self-expression might be little more than a contingent recombinatory node of meaning in a dancing landscape of shifting patterns, linguistic fields, meanings and concepts.
Unconscious and unacknowledged, the true power of narrative lies in the self-propagating autonomy it expresses – above and beyond any putative human control. We do not own the stories and meanings through which we live so much as they own us but an essential dissimulation of reflexive psychological self-definition endlessly fails, and is foundationally unable, to recognise this fallacy.
A characteristically long and wordy waffle on the topic of human intelligence, the cognitive hyper-extension of technology, an iterative fracture of grand narrative into abbreviated artefacts, unconscious biases and a Global turn towards authoritarianism.
We are all empty, don’t let the shambling leviathan of commercial culture make you feel less than you are, feel worthless or unvalued and unloved.
Afraid of the Darkness that the Other and the Unknown represent, we inscribe this upon ourselves, into ourselves.
The distributed information systems which we experience as social, cultural, economic and cognitive (or technologically-mediated) reality are implicitly weighted towards the self-replication and reproduction of existing patterns and biases.
Daedelus Kite 