Digital Dark Age: The Dead Weight of the Real World

‘The Digital Dark Age’ is the idea that because of outdated file formats/software/hardware or data decay, the huge amount of information being generated now may be lost forever to future generations. To a future historian, we mightn’t exist. It’s important to think about those incidental moments in your life...

What Is It Like To Be A Bat? by Thomas Nagel

Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914. CONSCIOUSNESS is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave...

Previous Artist’s Statement

I’m thinking about what to write for my new artist’s statement and was reminded of the one I wrote in my final year at Chelsea… ————————- If I was writing this as a film script, I’d start with EXT. THE FINAL BLACK HOLE AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE–...

Space 3

Part 1 Part 2 Since the year 2000, there have been far too many films made about people traveling to new spaces to do them all justice- and that’s just ones written or directed by Charlie Kaufman- but I will try and cram in enough of them to give...

Glocal Metamodernisms Conference April 27-27 2023

I just attended the Glocal Metamodernisms Conference in Jyväskylä, Finland and gave a talk on the idea of ‘space’ and ‘alternative spaces’ as represented in films (see Space 1 and Space 2 for more, Space 3 will be up soon). Though I have no qualms or nervousness about the...

Space 2

Part 1 is here. I’ve been looking at examples of films – mainly – about characters that travel to a ‘new or a different space’ in order to see how films have reflected our changing understanding of where we are over the years. In the early era of film,...

Space 1

I’ve been looking at the idea of ‘Space’ and our changing thoughts on what that is and where we exist. These changes are prompted by new discoveries, new technologies or media, each one extending us and giving us access to a new way of being in and perceiving the...

Trees on a screen

Midjourney prompt “A woman suspended in a non-physical space looking at trees on a screen.”...

Silence

DALL-E prompt “Shadowy black and white close-up photograph of a fearful woman’s face with a man’s hand grabbing her mouth.”...

“Just Make Stuff”

There are Artists… and then there are People Who Call Themselves Artists. There are people who do Art without calling themselves an Artist, of course… and there are people who call themselves an Artist without doing capital A Art. Is it enough to just ‘create, create, create’ without, for...

Study Group- Wade Guyton

This week we looked at Wade Guyton AND HIS FREAKIN’ AMAZING PRINTS. I just love them so much. “Wade Guyton (b. 1972) is an American artist known for using large format printers, desktop computers, and scanners, to make digital “paintings” on canvas. Guyton’s process does not involve the traditional...

Study Group – Jon Rafman

This week the study group looked at Canadian artist Jon Rafman. We looked specifically at Nine Eyes of Google Street View, which is an ongoing project of images found on Google Street View. I first remember reading about his project Kool-Aid Man In Second Life though I just remember...

On Dehumanisation

I’ve noticed people using the word ‘dehumanise’ a lot recently. We all understand the very basic idea of it – eg calling groups of people ‘cockroaches’ or ‘animals’ which conceptually strip the group of the qualities that give them ‘humanness’ which then turns them into ‘legitimate targets’… But when...