Artist statement(s)

NB: This series of thoughts will be updated, edited, deleted, scrapped, chopped up, etc in an ongoing basis. Variously, it will be stupid, smart, grandiose, wrong, simple, or whatever. So what you’re reading now is the definitive version, and the different one you read next time will also be the definitive version and so on.

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Order out of chaos: pace and process in a society of rapidity and rush

  1. Modern society demands that we optimise, rush, consume. We are all unique, atomised, data points now, and what we see is tailored to each of us accordingly.
  2. If art fits into this rush it is mostly pointless. A social media post is forgotten before it is fully scrolled off the screen. Art is something you live with and changes with you.
  3. Time is the only currency left in our technologically optimised world. Time cannot be optimised, trimmed, shaved, aggregated, and programmatically sold back to us.
  4. Many pieces of art today counter the onslaught of imagery and video by emphasising craft, and slow deliberate work. We look and wonder at the time it took to create it, albeit often via a 15-second video that autoscrolls onto something else.
  5. In these moments we marvel at the craft: the focus, the making of the art, the time which went into making it.
  6. Craft is wonderful and sacred, but it is not the only path to art. The opposite of craft is generative-AI – give a machine instructions and marvel at what is produced. Never mind the quality, feel the width. But even this celebrates the craft, the process.
  7. Artists can produce volume without automation. It means that quality varies, but personal perception means that “good” is a moving target amongst its human viewers. Your thoughts are the same as my thoughts; so what is left? What is unique now? What art do you want to live with?

The internet and you and me and us

  1. “Boiling the frog” is one of those seemingly-smart phrases used by seemingly-smart people in the tech industry. It’s used as an analogy for user adoption, because if you place a frog in a pan of slowly-heated water, it won’t recognise that it is being boiled alive until it is too late.
  2. To “boil the frog” is to ensnare users or change behaviours without the user recognising it: see the buzzy social media platform that is free, easy to use, and that offers attention-grabbing content and unfathomable connection with other people. Or free email. Or books and CDs that are cheaper than your local shop. Or taxi rides cheaper than your local firm. You are drawn by the convenience, ensnared, and then boiled alive. You remain with the social media app despite endless ads, subterfuge sponcon, and political manipulation.
  3. The cost for free email is all of your personal data inside those emails. The books and CDs and taxi rides are the same price as the local services now, but they’re all closed or you’ve been trained to be lazy to use them.
  4. When the internet first emerged, it was weird, hidden, labyrinthine, basic, scrappy, creative and individual. Liberating and egalitarian. Shocking and authentic; kinky and fake. Since then “the internet” has settled into a few huge websites and that spirit is forced into the corners and  lives on as memes rather than infrastructure. 
  5. “The internet” now means a delivery and influence system: the means to get #content in front of the “right” eyes and influence them to do… something. Neither part is aligned with the internet’s original intention or iteration.
  6. Yet humans remain, at the core – albeit scraping crumbs of l power and influence that the major sites allow – and more often flung to the farthest edges, as atomised individuals, isolated by discrete data bubbles in order to manipulate them.
  7. The internet, viewed from any standpoint other than your personal bubble, is chaos. 
  8. What is the effect of this chaos on the squishy human beings who are swept along by its infinite current?