Sketches of Empty

 

"pardon my dust"

“reimagining in progress”.

Google office motos,Silicon valley.

“As we look at the sky we might

sometimes be aware the sky is

looking back at us.” 

James Bridle New Dark Age, Technology and the End of the Future

“The altering eye, alters all”

William Blake

 

As boundaries of art and life blur, new previously unknown art forms have risen, most pervasive are the screens we use everyday.

In a drawing style reminiscent of late Rococo and mid-career Disney, SOE links screens, road traffic, monoxide,unseen heating sea,and blank space. Blank incisions, of composed pianola coding holes, invade picture surfaces seemingly doing different unobservant jobs to the visual. Music scores accompanying each drawing reinforce the incised pianola coding’s pitch and rhythm, mostly unreadable nowadays and perhaps elitist as the coding we trust those scores represent.*  These form a background perhaps analogous to the unreadable activities of machinic learning or the inscrutable practices of corporations managing our digital sphere. As users or learners we ignore any qualities in screens, apart from accidental dust accretions, fingerprints, food spills etc, we look through screens.  SOE presents screens, however featureless, as membranes or textures with optical qualities and 3-dimensional material surfaces of imagination and creativity.  Screens are also one of many portals availing lives we lead to the surveillance economy, where algorithmic profiles and faces are mined and sold on. Our best and brightest are amply rewarded for advancing ways to read and instrumentalise emotions and intentions. Thank you for listening.

 

*Friedrich Kitler describes Thomas Edison”s first sound recording, screaming “MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB” onto a revolving wax cylinder, then trying to copy/draw/sculpt wax sound bumps of the spoken letter “a”, on to another wax cylinder, with a handheld stylus.  After 3 weeks of effort Edison knew he couldn’t “write sound”. The split between symbolic inscription and recording was born. If inscription, or drawing, works properly, it won't “mean” anything real. Instead it participates in capturing a moment of reality’s transformation or “non closure”.