ARTISTIC STATEMENT

As far back as 1953, the question of technology and the nature of the machine was paramount. German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” states, “Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where alétheia, truth happens.” In my work, I seek to investigate this realm, a space between science and art. I seek to reconcile these two disciplines, often juxtaposed, so that scientific innovation comes full circle to create a new type of “haunting” or artistic presence.

Through my oil paintings, I use a medium laden with hundreds of years of human tradition to explore the visual identity of technology. The paintings are evidenced of human creation, however the imagery has an inhuman coldness, a hyperreal depiction of the manufactured, lacking narrative. It is as if the machines exist without a user, residing separately in their own distinct presence. This presence is a visual one, a push and pull of virtual space, and an interaction between light and material.

Just as technology resides in its own visual identity, so does work produced using that technology. Because of the integration of the computer in the process of Digital and New Media artwork, a cyborg creative force is founded in the collaboration of man and machine, and the particular machine used in the creation of the work leaves a specific mark upon its identity. It is through the generations of computing equipment then, that New Media work can be subclassified, establishing a new kind of history: a history of obsolete hardware. In my installations, I appropriate manufactured remnants and icons of computer culture, both future and obsolete, in a sort of enduring functionality- anthropomorphic and absurd. In the “Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway asserts, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” My art exists in this strange realm between human and machine, a space of cyborg symbiosis, of technotrash and future nostalgia. As Heidegger postulates, “Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on one hand, akin to the essence of technology, and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.”