handmade book project

Animation test

I made this little animation for fun by drawing 4 frames on acetate and scanning them into Photoshop.

Filling Station

"Filling Station". oil on canvas. 6 x 4 feet.

Painting 200 final, we were asked to produce a horizontal composition with an environmental theme, I began thinking about bottled water, water ownership rights, etc. I imagined a scene built around something like a gas station where water is as equally commodified a resource. Progress shots below:

"McLuhan Invokes a Shamanic Analogue"

(This is a midterm essay I wrote for the class "Technology & Contemporary Art". We were required to discuss the writing of Marshall McLuhan in relation to several artists and their work. It's a few pages so I hid the rest under the jump break.)

McLuhan Invokes a Shamanic Analogue

Prevailing Western cultural myths surrounding technological advancement plot a trajectory of cumulative “innovations” that propel civilization – and by extension the individual – in a progressively more rational, mechanized, automated and abiological direction: away from the natural world and the animal body. It is generally accepted that technology represents a triumph over nature via a body of progressive improvements on tools and other media, and while that can be demonstrated to be categorically true, any analysis of the underlying side effects of individuals submerged in the techno-industrial milieu, especially negative observations, are met with skepticism, confusion or derision and occur late if at all. In the mid-20^th century, Marshall McLuhan presented an alternative interpretation that reversed the trajectory of the previous Weltanschauung; specialized, machine-like Cartesian man was a biproduct of print technology, print itself was a detour and the new electric technology promised to paradoxically deliver humanity back to an audile-tactile, whole field perception illuminated by the image of an instantaneously connected global tribe. It is the purpose of this paper to describe McLuhan's pioneering and prescient analyses that continue to run contrary to the generally accepted view of the techno-human condition (a mindset itself, according to McLuhan, that is a relic of long obviated print-oriented sense ratios[1]) in relation to individuals working in the arts and their role in the potential elucidation of the hidden yet profoundly transformative effects of the ubiquitous experience of media.

UFO Observing Mycoremediation

"The idea of a dimension-roving lens vehicle, once articulated, was never far away."
Inspired by Terence McKenna and Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).
Watercolor and ink on watercolor paper, 6x4 inches.

Life Drawing with Ink & Brush

Another life drawing session.

Game of Drones

 
Normalization of violence through entertainment media comes as no surprise. Oil on canvas.

Ink Doodles

Unplanned drawing with ink and a large brush on 18x24 newsprint

Sketchbook cuts

Drawing Midterm

Third part of plant painting project, this one is very pale, hard to photograph.

Life Drawing in Ink

Last life drawing session I tried using ink with brushes on watercolor paper.

Finished this painting, I'd like to go back and rework the face and the red/orange in the lower right at some point.

This project entails painting a familiar subject then isolating and essentializing it by reducing color and form. I'll paint another one that's further abstracted during the next week.

sketchbook cuts

Intaglio I Final Project

"Does the interiorization of media alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?", a question posed and subsequently explored in Marshall McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962), one of the concepts central to McLuhan's body of work to which this project is a reaction and response.

McLuhan suggests that "when technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized." From the perspective, or lack thereof, experienced by people living in the present Age of Information, the implications of the interiorization of mass digital communication technology like the Internet seem to surpass anything conjectured during McLuhan's time, yet simultaneously confirm all his expectations. Writing in the 1950s and 60s, the technology he fully analysed was that of the printed alphabetical text, facilitated by the invention of the printing press, and the cultural and social transformations accompanying the transition from the oral tradition of manuscript-based media to the rational, codified and fragmented society with the book and the textual library of knowledge at its core.

Few individuals appear to have anticipated the Internet as fully (and as critically) as McLuhan, and very few still seem to be on the edge of grasping the interiorization and integration of these technologies as not just culturally significant but biological events; as paradigmatic shifts that radically affect humans at the level of our cognitive operational models. I am still fully shocked that in the near wake of the Sputnik launch, the earliest days of satellite transmission and television, someone was accurately anticipating that electric media meant the extension of the human nervous system into an "all-at-once" field of information, dissolving boundaries and uniting the globe, and the human family, on one stage; a pure prophecy encompassing Debord's spectacle, Baudrillard's simulacra/simulation, Virilio's dromosphere and Gibson's cyberspace.

I feel this idea of simultaneous and total involvement in each other – systems of exchange of information which facilitate a stage-like experience or virtual "presence" between people, however mundane – is perfectly exemplified by YouTube, a service most people in Western society are now at least familiar with. Through this project, I intended to capture something of the perspective I found myself in, watching recordings of Marshall McLuhan on a computer, through the Internet, in the YouTube window, describing phenomena which were, in fact, the exact things mediating the experience itself.

Through the combined use of print-based technology and modern, digital techniques, I produced a series of work that collides and superimposes models of media – appropriating a printed text which in turn is an appropriation of Greek history which once belonged to the hand-made manuscript and audile tactile tradition, and corrupting it and obviating it with the printed YouTube frame and temporality disrupting "pause" and "play" symbols, which are universal in our modern experience of media, a circumvention of time. The work is confusing and disjointed like the ever-accelerating and self-negating cultural media milieu in which we find ourselves; simultaneously a frozen video frame belonging to a dynamic visual system, a printed record of ancient history and a unique handmade manuscript, contexts and paradigms which make the past model obsolete and outmoded as we move forward without understanding the consequences of further and further extension of the human animal into a form of pure information. Images of a face, an eye staring into a grid of the electronic network, a communications satellite stamped in printed ink haunt the torn pages like the spectre of outmoded media and outmoded human perception haunting history, like McLuhan's cybernetic phantasm haunting cyberspace from the past, present and future simultaneously.