Context: New analysis of human portraits reveals shift in culture, cognition We could just as well speak of aspirationally-unified (boundless, seamless, reflexive, interdependent) cultural and cognitive information-processing fields, topologically Ouroboros-like and akin to those conceptually-variegated and mischievously labyrinthine mathematical beasts of physics. A clear problem of determination, definition or observational identification here is in that […]
We are all swept away by the normative idioms of our era. It is only really ever true that in retrospect the particular peculiarities of cultural identity and material self-expression become apparent. This (our) moment in time is not marked by any unique idiom or stylistic trait so much as the aggregate and accelerating dissolution, […]
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 […]
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 […]
When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it’s inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference. It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of […]
Tattoos are a clear indication that all symbols, all representation and all meaning is not merely (or literally) inscribed upon our bodies and in our symbolic narratives. All meaning and symbolic representation warps our cultural space back onto itself; it is recursively twisted and bound back upon and through itself. All representation seeks the continuing […]
Where does art stop and the person begin? Is the frame of the canvas the boundary? Is the wall, the room, the building the boundary? Is the audience the definitive edge and boundary condition between the artefact and the meaning or interpretation?
My problem is, and pretty much always has been, just how to introduce, articulate and successfully communicate new concepts of representation and comprehension when the paradigm and assumptive frameworks of conventional wisdom fight tooth and nail against novelty or deep (i.e. axiomatic) conceptual, methodological and theoretical innovation ?
