Hard to believe we are now a third of the way through the course, and it’s been three months since I was last in the college studios. In the initial phase of lockdown, I felt like I had lots of energy and was painting daily. Then we went into assessment hand in and the focus went to scanning, collating and uploading. Over the last couple of weeks, I felt a bit stuck, stage 1 had come to an end and I wasn’t really sure how to start again. Fortunately, I have had plenty of work on, so I didn’t beat myself up too much.
We’ve been doing various mini projects, but my next body of work was being elusive. Interesting, that sometimes if we give it space the other than conscious starts to help out. I now have my Stage 2 proposal.
Digital Remains
An ongoing exploration of how living in the digital era, ‘being digital,’ is affecting our social and cultural practices . The title has a deliberate double meaning in that it is looking at how my digital work might circulate and flow after I die as well as the fact that digital is here to stay and is having a deep impact on how we live our lives. Most of my work is stored digitally and circulates across networks; existing as code rather than physical objects. After my death it is vulnerable to glitches, degradation, appropriation and re-distribution.
I have also, a bit scarily, started a ‘Machine Learning for Artists and Musicians’ course.
I’ve been looking back at the Rothko and Me project and ideally want to get to a position where I can use my own archive as a training set. I suspect that’s still a way off yet! In the meantime, I’ve been thinking more about still life/Nature Morte and doing a lot of reading around mortality, impermanence and digital afterlife.
I started thinking about digital remnants and abstracts, which led me to notions of colour blocks. If I understand it right when we send data across the internet it doesn’t go in one big data blob, it gets separated into packets. Each packet has a small amount of data that includes the source, destination, and content and they are sent along different pathways. All these packets mush back together at the other end to create the received message or file. This makes the process faster and more reliable.
This made me think about what might happen if the packets didn’t reunite. What if, in the future, someone sends one of my still life images and the colours get separated? I took some of the core colours from one of my traditional still life photographs and created a series of three digital images. Each seems to pulsate and carries an energy of its own. A very simple idea, but I’m hoping it will open up some new approaches.