The Drawing Board

“If it was possible, in the past, to speak of the fetishism of the commodity, of money, of the simulacrum and the spectacle, that was still a limited fetishism (related to sign-value). There stretches beyond this for us today the world of radical fetishism, linked to the de-signification and limitless operation of the real – to the sign’s becoming pure object once again, before or beyond any metaphor.” – Baudrillard

In this passage, Baudrillard speaks of the sign being returned to object-hood. So, as an example, technologically speaking, things that are referenced as objects in hyperspace are not just signs of objects, but objects themselves. I take this way of thinking to heart, because my interest in photography and art in general lies in process and materiality. For 10 years I have played with the idea of using process in an object-oriented way to manipulate what is represented in the photograph. Sure, I have had an interest in documenting actual events or specific things that are conventionally perceived as not being obscured through process, but that is not what drives my motivation to make art. I do not particularly enjoy taking a straight photo of a thing and sitting in a group of people while we throw around ideas about the meaning derived by the objects in that image that have already been discussed dozens of times in similar ways. I am interested in taking an abstract idea and applying it directly to the visual piece in question, with or without the representation. Sometimes this leads to a visually confusing outcome because the piece is so specific, trying to derive vague meaning from it is difficult if you have never seen it before. So, in a sense, I am literally using language in attempt to create my own visual language through the interplay of object/idea. Every creative idea I have ever had has based itself upon some language in a text I have read because I use learning as a key strategy to making art. My ideas do not come to me because I have thought to myself, “I wonder what will happen if I do this”. While that is always an intriguing way to think of work I am making, the core idea is not so simple.

This mode of production seems to be very selfish in the sense that it does not allow anyone viewing easy access to the heart of what I “must” have been thinking when I made the images, they are there to beg the question about what I was thinking in a way that is, hopefully, meditative. Purely visually speaking, I want my work to have a meditative quality to it that allows for anyone viewing it to visually see it as making sense in a very personal way….the work is about me, but is also about you. This is, perhaps, my most difficult task. To come out of specificity to something so vaguely appealing that it will reach out to others in a way that transcends language.

Most of what I see in conceptual art these days revolves around the death of the author. One artist makes a contraption that creates interesting abstract paintings when you vibrate the floor as you walk by, another attaches a pencil to a tree branch so the wind allows it to draw, or someone culls the internet for found images to arrange in an archive. All this is interesting and inspiring, however, what is the next step? Why is it that conceptual art has been stuck in the machine influenced, author-less void for the past 20 or so years?

Part of the answer must lie in the obsession we have with vast strides that have been made in the realm of technology and how much of an impact it has had in daily life. Someone once told me that people tend to look backward into history as they live in the present and truly great artists are the ones that can look clearly at the present to give us ideas of the future. While I must agree that technology has taken us into a new realm of interactive art that highlights the interaction of the viewer or something “other” than the artist in order for it to be successful, I am skeptical to accept the idea that only (seemingly) author-less art can come from this knowledge. It seems that the most effective thing any socially based artwork/network has ever done is to make the person interacting with it feel that they are special and a creator themselves, which propagates the cycle of authorship.

Here is a passage from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations that speaks to my investigation into photography.

“………It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials – worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.”

This passage speaks to my investigations into the mathematical composition of digital photography and also my interest in how photography is produced and distributed specifically for social media networks.

How mathematical inquiry comes out of notions of the photographic index (The argument for photography’s ability to represent reality):

“These would be the successive phases of the image:
 
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
 
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.
 
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.”