Most of our identity is constructed from what we learn. In a sense, we're walking amalgams of bits and pieces in formation. The historical threads of written and interpreted thought pass through us while we keep only fragments. Our tacit paraphrase of these ideas weave together into unified, open-ended wholes. It's this shredded, textual characteristic of identity that my self-portrait attempts to represent.
This is an illustration of technology's potential to 'extend' our mind beyond its dermatological confines. Facilitated by technology we're able to communicate over great distances almost instantaneously. Moving images, and images that move, contain our collective memories projected on screens of various size and orientation. We are continually sharpening our intuitive use of these tools to phantasmically extend our primitive reach in the world.
Thinking further about the idea of place, and how sound contributes to it, I'm looking more into echolocation. Echolocation, as used by bats, reconstructs the closest objects first and foremost in the bats' navigation. As of now, scientists can't show that bats actually form a visual image of some sort in their mind from the auditory data they collect. In that case, it could be called a "cross-modal transfer". The information crosses from the auditory mode to the visual mode.
I spent a few hours yesterday attempting to implement a picture viewing feature on my blog. It wasn't anything particularly fancy, but when you clicked on an image it would have opened in the center of the screen with a semi-transparent black background. I've only got limited skill in web design, so I wasn't sure if I had everything working right. I changed this, that, and the other thing over and over and couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, or even right for that matter.
Then, I just read today that blogger was busy implementing their own default picture viewer the same day I was trying to do mine!!! haha. Oh well. At least it explains why there were 2 picture viewers at one point. And it gave me a good opportunity to use that sketch I did a while ago :D
Just a fun video that goes along with the theme of my website design here.
Being on the precipice of the 9/11 ten year anniversary I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about the New York City skyline. In my Technology in the Art Room class, my group happened to pick the skyline as an example of an iconic image and how it fits in with Walter Benjamin's theory of Aura. His description is somewhat ellusive, but many appear to take it as a form of 'authenticity'. That's hard to imagine considering experts go to great lengths to authenticate questionable works and authentication is often given in the form of a written document for a particular work.
A better analogue for the idea of aura might be 'presence'. The point being that the presence of a particular artwork is lost in the reproduction of that work. Eitherway, the New Yorker Magazine recently featured an artist specifically for his illustrations of the NYC skyline. They discuss in part how the loss of the twin towers affects his work. Could it be said the skyline lost some of its aura with the change?
That's just an overall view of some of my workspace. I think the zoomed out view and the context it affords is a statement about my work in general. Despite its various styles and levels of attention, most of my work has a distinct 'lived in' quality I think. By which I mean, an apparent chaos concealing an underlying order borne out with time.
