Synthetic Echoes, 2024
The challenge of the moment is therefore to re-think the meaning of appropriation in relation to a reality constituted by a multiplicity of spatialized temporalities. (Verwoert, 2007)
I have now been working with the art of Rachel Ruysch and my Dutch women of the 17th Century as a starting point for more than five years. I am intrigued by how our digitality has connected me to the work of a woman some 300 years ago and while I have stood in front of some of her original canvases her work is primarily known to me via the internet. The traces have flowed through the centuries and are now received as pixels on a screen.
The direction my work has taken recently has brough me in touch with notions of appropriation, repetition and originality. The concept of originality has not left us even though the capacity for reproduction is now almost infinite. Rather than copies I tend to think of my current body of work more as echoes, they draw from but are decidedly different to Rachel. Given I am also working with machine learning based on algorithms trained on large models I am very conscious that there are also many other echoes in the work that I am not able to identify.
We seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach. (Jameson, 1988)
Much of my current trajectory is indeed about the out of reach, the disappeared or yet to be. Akin to Derrida’s ‘hauntology’ the lingering aspect of the past in the present, and for me also projected into the future.
When you call up a spectre, it will not content itself with being inspected, it will require active negotiations to accommodate the ghost and direct its actions or at least keep them in check. (Verwoert, 2007)
Through its appropriated roots the work is becoming an invocation by which it is brought into being, ‘you cannot test a spell. To utter it is to put it into effect.’ (Verwoert, 2007) Not only am I living with Rachel and her peers I am finding ways of letting them speak.
Still life of roses, tulips, a sunflower and other flowers in a glass vase with a bee, butterfly and other insects upon a marble ledge, 1710, Rachel Ruysch
AI transparency declaration:
Generation: images were generated using machine learning platforms Runway and Playform. Their manipulation was based on human choices.
Improved: Images were improved using Photoshop AI
Suggested: no text or images were suggested using machine learning
Corrected: Text has been corrected using word processing standard spelling and grammar tools. Any corrections have been accepted or rejected based on human discretion
References
Jameson, F. (1988). Postmodernism and consumer society. na.
Verwoert, J. (2007). Living with ghosts: from appropriation to invocation in contemporary art. Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, 1(1).