I D E N T I T Y. Identity, identify, individual, diverse, divisional, diluted.

My work has focused on areas of Identity over the last several years, of which you will find numerous references throughout this site, taking various perspectives on how art can be seen as a reflection of identity, and indeed how [...]]]> I D E N T I T Y. Identity, identify, individual, diverse, divisional, diluted.

My work has focused on areas of Identity over the last several years, of which you will find numerous references throughout this site, taking various perspectives on how art can be seen as a reflection of identity, and indeed how identity can be seen as a reflection of the art we create.

I’ve come to understand that the process of creating art changes the artist in some way. We apply such a focus on externalising our emotion, our inner ‘vision’, that the process of looking actually changes that which we look at- an exorcism of sorts. The externalisation of thought, processed and transformed by our consciousness.

The outcome of the artist is usually for the viewer to feel something, to have a reaction to the work in some way- to disrupt the everyday patterned thinking and lodge a new idea or emotional fingerprint into that person’s experience. To achieve this, the artist must first experience that which they wish to convey, and in reality, experience a graduated array of emotions and thought as the process of creating the work progresses.

The artist ‘feels’ the work is complete at a certain stage, and often must fight logical impulses to keep working. This ‘feeling’, an emotional waypoint, is the critical moment in the works history, and must be listened for and respected if the emotional content and effect is to be conveyed with full, raw intensity.

When I think back to art that has impacted me in some way, I find that there is commonality. The work in question often caught me unaware, or disrupted my chain of thought to such an extent that IT BECAME MY REALITY for a few short moments. This communication is below the ‘logical’ level of the mind and interfaces more directly with our emotions.

Of course not all viewers would be similarly affected, the work instead lies in wait for those predisposed to its message- silently waiting to memetically hatch from its frame, it effectively has an ‘identity’ target market. Our identity, our current focus, our current priorities all affect the response, and often that response will be to walk on by, our minds filters never letting the work past the first stage of awareness. However, from time-to-time a ‘match’ wil be found, and our attention becomes attuned to the work.

Arts effectiveness is in appealing to those core human facets of identity and emotion. Everything we were, are and hope to be reflected back at us as if we are experiencing it for the first time. Identity in art is more than creating art that is personal to the artist- all art is personal to some degree. Our identity provides the ‘environment’ in which the work is created, and perhaps more significantly- defines the audience with whom the work will most intensely resonate.

Note: This essay accompanies my ‘Identity Art Series’.

We reduce, delete, generalise, filter and simplify the outside world to such a degree that our reality is nothing more than a guesswork lattice, mapping fragments of the vista of experience. Information is everywhere, literally. We move through the world unaware of most of the [...]]]> Note: This essay accompanies my ‘Identity Art Series’.

We reduce, delete, generalise, filter and simplify the outside world to such a degree that our reality is nothing more than a guesswork lattice, mapping fragments of the vista of experience. Information is everywhere, literally. We move through the world unaware of most of the information, perceiving and judging the steady stream that does make its way into our minds. Of course our consciousness couldn’t cope with much more than we currently accept, not without sacrificing some element here or there. We are indeed deletion creatures, and that brings us to the post-it note.

It has been said that the understanding can be found in the smallest grain of sand, we needn’t look out to the oceans for the understanding we have inside of us already. I write my sentence. The post-it note is a tangible indicator of our dealing with reality, we think of events in detail, filter down to key components and summarise this in writing to ourselves at a later point in time. Whenever we again look at the post-it note, we must go through that same process in reverse make meaning out of the fragmented clues we left ourselves.

What if we used the post-it note to explore our own identity, if we shattered the mirrors that look back in despair, and instead trusted in 76mm2 coloured sheets of partially adhered paper? What if that 76mm2 space became the equivalent of the entire world, what if we got lost beyond comprehension only to find our salvation in our own marks?

We once discovered the truest meaning of humanity, but forgot what it was. For years we searched and searched, but found only contempt. What if we remembered who we were, who we are and who we are going to be? What if we are already all of those things?

(2006)

Note: This essay accompanies my Post-it Note Artwork, which forms a part of my ‘Identity Art’ Series.

Maybe Post-it notes are the office equivalent of the artists canvas, maybe the 76mm square area is like a window to the soul, maybe it’s just paper and adhesive without context and without hope. Isn’t it [...]]]> Note: This essay accompanies my Post-it Note Artwork, which forms a part of my ‘Identity Art’ Series.

Maybe Post-it notes are the office equivalent of the artists canvas, maybe the 76mm square area is like a window to the soul, maybe it’s just paper and adhesive without context and without hope. Isn’t it strange how a piece of paper can achieve so much significance with the marks of the artists hand. likewise the dreams we leave playing on ours pillows each morning, often go unnoticed if not mocked as our conditioned adult filters take excruciating care in not allowing us to act childish, an irony, when we consider the truest demonstration of life is only found in the most childish of things.

The innocence of a flippant doodle, an unconscious externalisation of the telephone call about nothing in particular. we bore ourselves to death, quite literally, by trusting 700 page reports rather than our intuitive mind, honed and developed over thousands of years so that we can disregard it’s communication as irrelevant. It is our filters which are irrelevant when they go beyond a useful limiting of external stimulus, we overuse them to actually believe that reality is what we see, hear and feel. This is the grandest of misunderstandings, that we, such an advanced civilisation trust in no-one but our own filtering of media filtered junk. No, this cannot be happening!

I take my post-it note and draw until understanding arises, I expect the unexpected, and believe in and trust it’s ‘childish’ games. To you it may be a square of coloured paper, to me it’s the door to another world.

Like the Steppenwolf of Hesse, who found himself walking endless corridors in search of the one thing he did not understand, I flick through post-its searching for a link I cannot comprehend. They flicker by like yesterdays sunset played on fast forward, looping recursively, without beginning and without end. I used to wonder whether the images in my mind were real, whether a cube after a cube could relate to my living room floor, or walls, or doors. I kept on drawing those lines, hoping for salvation from a compartmental life, the pages keep on, image after image, when suddenly, the letters ‘you wish you were you’ flashed like lightening across the darkest of skies. Each letter embedding itself firmly within the conical receptors of my eyes, etched for a lifetime, a permanent reminder that I had been searching for meaning, when it was the process of searching that was the meaning all along.

John Lennon once said that ‘life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans’, maybe this procession of images is the externalisation of life, happening, in front of our very eyes, maybe you’ll still search for meaning, making your plans, whilst another fragment of my life passes you by, maybe you’ll stop and wonder what it was like to be a child.

(2006)

Can you imagine a future where we are no longer important. Where humans have fallen from the hefty heights of technical excellence, to languish instead in the school yard fight for resources and ultimately survival.

The Internet changed the world in a few short years. An explosion of technical information and skills and [...]]]> Can you imagine a future where we are no longer important. Where humans have fallen from the hefty heights of technical excellence, to languish instead in the school yard fight for resources and ultimately survival.

The Internet changed the world in a few short years. An explosion of technical information and skills and of hardware and computational power that we still struggle to fully comprehend. We are now almost completely reliant on computers, they make the processed food we consume, they store our medical records and remember where the wealth and the debt lies. The last decade is such a small grain in the vast sands of time, yet so much has changed.

We have become out of date.

Our brains may be viewed as the current pinnacle of evolutionary design, yet we struggle to deal with more than 5/7 pieces of information at any given time in consciousness. In a society where the amount of information flowing through fibre optics, the airwaves and even outer space is exponentially increasing year on year. We have reached a point of no return, we must adapt quickly.

By 2014 it’s possible that a computer will have been conceived if not built, which has the computational power in excess of the human mind. Stop and think about that. A COMPUTER THAT EXCEEDS THE POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND. Artificial Intelligence is here, and we are about to combine that with a superior processing ability than our own, all in the naive assumption that we will still be in control.

We are already out of control.

Technology has become so integrated into our lives, that not having it would likely destroy the very fabric of society. So we continue to develop and deploy ever more complex technological solutions to problems most of us don’t even understand. We take for granted our most basic of resources, yet we have no idea how they are maintained. And why should we, when the computer knows how to do it. We are way too busy tagging our mp3 collections and finding online discount vouchers to save 5% on a new HD mega-pixel camera!

We consume because that’s all we know how to do. We work to pay for the things we feel we must consume, and in doing so fuel a cycle of development to satiate our increasingly outlandish demands. Computers take our orders, process our money, pick our items and send us e-mails on despatch. They feed our consumeristic habit, and we love them for it. We love the way that technology makes things easier for us to do, and we expect more. This expectation can never be met, but the development bus rolls on regardless.

The down escalator.

We are more intelligent now than at any other time in history, yet the fundamentals of society are no longer in our control. Money has been abstracted to an idea, not based on actual commodities. Communication is now digitised to such an extent that you’d be hard pressed to tell a computer voice from a real voice. Replication, one of the the most basic human instincts, is now subject to a quota.

Where does this all end?

Information is power, and by 2050, Murphy’s law indicates that we will have created machines, possessing more computational power than the entire human race combined. Take that thought and overlay it onto the advances expected in Artificial Technology and Genome/DNA sequencing, and you will have a vision of the future which could just as well be the cover from a 70′s Sci-Fi magazine. But it’s not.

In our own lifetimes we are likely to see more change than hundreds of past generations have seen combined. We must re-evaluate our position in the cosmos, from being the jewel in the crown of evolution, to facilitators of technology that makes our own accomplishments look like stone age tools. Yet we have a vital part to play. For better or for worse, we are set on a path of discovery. It’s our nature to progress, to push boundaries and unlock natures doors, but at what cost or at what prize will we find ourselves facing?

Can we summon the wisdom to make the right choices for humanity to thrive, or will we pursue technological evolution irrespective of the outcome?

We should be thankful for our position, we each have a vital role to play. We should respect scientific and technological advances, but tread with caution with the things we do not yet fully understand.

Humanities future is in our own hands for now, but how long before those hands are not our own.

We are all doomed to a technological death by computers. Our resources have value to a more intelligent being, which in their innate cleverness will exploit it to our absolute peril. How can we ever hope to control an intelligence that is more intelligent than ourselves?

Computer viruses and human viruses will merge to [...]]]> We are all doomed to a technological death by computers. Our resources have value to a more intelligent being, which in their innate cleverness will exploit it to our absolute peril. How can we ever hope to control an intelligence that is more intelligent than ourselves?

Computer viruses and human viruses will merge to create a new disease. The transfer between machine and man will be enabled when the first connections are allowed into our bodies, through DNA modification.

We are changing DNA, like we understand the implications of doing so. The sad fact is that we understand intellectually what basic relationships exist between our DNA and our development, but these have not been tested by nature. Nature is the original testing ground for replication and mutation. I doubt the social acceptability of a test lab to do the same.

We will make mistakes that will spread. We will introduce differences across generations. We hand-over from Mother Nature, and destroy millions of years of exhaustive testing and development with a few clicks of a mouse.

We are that clever. We can change the human race because we know better than Mother Nature. We modify our food, our water, our air and ultimately our future. We are already Human 2.0, only it’s a label we give ourselves, not one earned through progression.

I write this not from the land on which I once stood, but from a shelter underground. Mother nature has a fight on her hands, but one, which is laughably easy to win. Humans are an interim stage of nature, not nature itself. We can happily destroy ourselves through obsessive manipulation of our surroundings, yet nature will simply look on in neutrality, with a finger on the trigger of annihilation.

We die for less than we should; we live to be less than we could. We don’t have the right to destroy a world, which is not even ours. We have developed into the most intelligent beings on a planet called earth. Yet our intelligence cannot even stop us from killing ourselves with ridiculously sized weapons of war.

The majority of people do not even enjoy their lives. Instead they exist in the hope of stumbling across a lucky break. We live for no purpose and with no direction. We let others make our decisions, and in doing so help orchestrate the ultimate demise of the human race. We let others make decisions that are not theirs to make. Not only that, but we pay them to do it.

We stand by and allow other human beings to be kicked to death in front of us because we don’t want to get involved, or too busy buying lottery tickets. We give money to scratch card companies and dubious charities, which do nothing to truly improve human kinds chances of survival, and in that action of giving we empower someone else to make our decisions on what really matters.

Humanity has become a direct debit.

It’s too late for us now; we have travelled down this neon sign-posted road for too many years to turn back. Yet the stars still shine above us, the earth still supports our weight below us. We are doomed to a fate, which we subscribed to. We watched our fate minute by minute on cable TV in high definition 1080p and surround sound with oxygen-free cables and gold-plated plugs.

We ate finely diced animal in bleached bread, drank fermented vegetables and marvelled at our own intelligence. Yes, we are intelligent. We are creatures of habit, and will do anything to avoid hassle and pain. We live precariously on the edge, praying that when we fall, we have enough insurance to cover our injuries, or enough evidence of the fall to claim an insurance payout.

We spent so much time regulating everything we possibly can; we lose sight of what’s important in our lives. We live in a context of fear and anxiety, where failure is permanent and credit ratings are more important than self-respect.

Fear and consumption, fear and consumption, even our death leads to fear of social unacceptability and consumption of very expensive firewood. It’s no longer about showing respect, but putting on a show. The performance has become our day-to-day lives; we can no longer walk the streets as ourselves, but as a celebrity in-waiting. Our public awaits another great performance, the only problem being that it’s a deception we play on ourselves.

There is clearly something very wrong with a society where our children’s ambitions in life are limited to the acquisition of a better mobile phone. We don’t even need money anymore to finance such luxuries; instead we take credit from double-glazing salesmen, and a new sofa paid for on tick. We offset our responsibilities to the next generation, not caring if we leave the world a better place or not.

We paid money to a government, which governed the depletion and destruction of our natural habitat, and used our scarce resources to kill other humans because they killed us, for killing them in the first place. The irony of our ‘just and honourable’ fight for peace is apparently lost on the self-appointed leaders of the day.

Reality TV was a hit between 1990 and 2010; we spent more of our lives watching disempowered people bear their souls for cash, without ever thinking of the shame. The amazing gift of life on this planet, at this time, surely cannot be better expressed than in the actions of a fat, alcoholic travelling insurance salesman purchasing McDeadAnimal with extra salt at a rat-infested drive-through. We should be ashamed at the mess we have all created.

Our consumption, makes it ok to produce products and entertainment which truly represent the dregs of a diseased society. We take all the shame of our self-destructive lifestyles and apportion the blame onto figments of our imagination, for this we are revered by some as truly good.

We tell our bodies to stay awake by drinking caffeine at night, and then drug ourselves because we can’t get to sleep. We drain ourselves to the limit putting up expensive patterned wallpaper and gold leafed borders, then catch colds because our bodies no longer have the strength to fight. Not to worry though, we can drive our big gas consuming trucks to big out of town supermarkets and buy imported drugs, which will hide the cold from everyone we meet. We are intelligent.

We all have a choice of what to do at each moment. Our choices are not determined by the action of others, only of the actions of ourselves. We choose to commit socially acceptable suicide by running the rat race every day, yet we complain and get upset because those rats die, even though it was usually their choice to do so.

We need to use are intelligence to undo what we have done. Nano-technology, high definition displays, genetic modification and cloning are tools of a civilisation, which can handle the responsibility. The fact we queue day after day to audition to be pop-stars, when we have zero-musical talent, is certainly not a good sign.

Give a man a gun and he will shoot someone, give a man a bomb and he’ll blow something up. Give a man the keys to nature’s encryption, and we are surely all doomed. Yet it’s inevitable. We can’t undo our progress, because it’s in our nature to be progressive. Nature itself is progressive, and we follow by example.

We will develop artificial intelligence, which can harm us in ways we cannot by definition comprehend. We will learn to clone people, find ways of contaminating our food and water supplies and learn to kill each other in more technologically advanced ways. It’s our destiny to figure out how to achieve these things, yet the action to actually carry them out will be a decision for each of us to make. It’s our destiny to make decisions, which ultimately define the fate of the human race. The technology is irrelevant, it’s the action taken which will steer our course, which will secure our fate as human beings.

You have a choice to make now. You can close this document and check your e-mail, or perhaps check out some lame videos on Youtube. Or you could do something now, which makes a difference to this world and to the human race. Take positive action, even if that’s just to pass this document to a friend or colleague, at least make a commitment to yourself that you will contribute to the world in some positive, creative way.

I doubt whether most people reading this will have gotten to this point, and why should they when they have celebrity game shows to watch. We need to start looking beyond the TV and our digital lives, to find the part of humanity that’s still alive within us. This is your moment to make a decision, use it wisely. What are you going to do next?

(2006)