I’ve just realized that this new vein of thought I've been working on the past year or so - purposefully misapplying constructs from different media to each other in order to uncover some of the limitations we unwittingly impose on our conception and development of media - is pretty much the same way I was thinking several years ago when I was focused on the idea of subverting the tools and definitions of media.
Take, for example, the original cardboard series, which explored applications of undo in the physical world by making art out of the clipboard, the stuff I had cut out of other projects. So, the left over scrap becomes the object, the inadvertent scratch while making the project becomes the project itself.
Or the sewn series and sewn shapes, which "complete" other's work in different media from the originals.
And, of course, assembled art (put the "ass" in assembled), which is more straightforward.
Take a recent Artist Statement:
I am fascinated by the interplay of media and cultures, and over the past decade or so have been examining cross-media and cross-cultural effects through sculpture, digital media, art events/ workshops, writing and academic research. I am interested in the precepts that define how we create different media, and what we can learn and create by applying them to different media and cultures. For instance, I've explored how digital media can be developed according to indigenous cultures of the South Pacific, information transfer according to environmental processes such as carbon-dioxide transfer, and web-searching according to surrealist automatic writing. I've found that these purposeful misapplications often cut through the hidden assumptions that unwittingly limit our definitions of what media can be.Now lets go back to 2001 for a snapshot of my thinking then:
Truly the greatest steps in the evolution of any media have not come about directly after a change in the available tools, but after a change in how we approach those tools.A rock is just a rock until you knock someone over the head with it. Post-Modernists, Situationists and hackers call this change of perspective subversion. Says the hacker: "If I can make a toaster play a DVD, I have that right." We can subvert our tools to purposes for which they weren't initially designed.Or we look at my notes for a talk I never gave:
- The Upended Perspective Bench, 2001
The postmodernists said the first step is to become aware of the medium. Then you subvert that medium, make it do something it wasn't "intended" to do, something outside its current paradigm. Once you've subverted it, then you can start to understand how to fully use all aspects of medium. And then you can work outside of the medium, beyond that medium, and the process starts again. That's how rocks became writing implements. We subverted their "natural" paradigm.Looking at my work then, it was less physical, but conceptually very similar. apply surrealist automatic writing to search engines; apply the way microcosms of the ecosystem work to the way information is transferred on the internet. So now where do I go? Apply the way we treat computers to the way it would affect a person. Apply what we do on a computer to how that works in the physical world. Turn a search engine of different media into a physical room Heck, I'm even planning on turning that old plan for a talk that never was into a video. I guess it shows consistency. Hopefully not stagnation, though the application is so different I don't see that as the case. And in the next two years I guess I'll find out if everyone else has already done all of this.
Footnotes: Never forget, Christopher Robbins is full of shit.
