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…
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If I was writing this as a film script, I’d start with
EXT. THE FINAL BLACK HOLE AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE–
but what would come next, DAY or NIGHT? All of the stars would have long been extinguished, the only faint light coming from the particles being radiated by the black hole. What would DAY or NIGHT even mean when there isn’t a planet left to spin on its axis nor stars to face towards or away from? Although maybe NIGHT would work best as it would clearly be pretty dark and we equate darkness with night. Besides, films aren’t documentaries. They are storytelling devices used to create emotions within the viewer. I can be lenient with the facts.
I’ll say ‘NIGHT‘.
EXT. THE FINAL BLACK HOLE AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE- NIGHT
A supermassive AI dedicates itself to recreating reality by collecting and sorting particles radiated from black holes in their death throes. The final particle needed to reconstruct my film is radiated out of the black hole and the AI gets to work.
It doesn’t know what it is rebuilding. It could be a Douglas Coupland novel. It could be a Joe Colombo ‘Smoke’ glass. It could be a red Panasonic R-70 Panapet radio. Each reconstruction provides ‘meaning’ in the universe once again.
The AI, having been constructed in an extremely advanced civilisation which had moved past a physical form, had spent its whole existence in an ethereal realm – all ideas and concepts and abstract thought- but this was something new.
Things. Stuff. Substance.
It reads stories. It waits 10^66 years for a novel to come out. Each one is full of descriptions of things it has never known. Sunsets. Roadside cafes. Haunted houses. Huey Lewis and the News. Conch shells. Support groups. Love.
After another 10^3 years, my film is reconstructed. The AI watches it with eons of experience behind it. It detects ‘love’. It detects ‘loss’. It detects ‘memories’. It detects ‘a particle pair split after one falls into a black hole, the other remaining particle longing to be with its partner again’.
The AI is content that its final work was to tell the story of that pair of particles once again.
Soon after that the universe was quiet and dark… forever.