| There is a distinctly visceral terror in the visual vivisection of the human form, an exploration familiar to surrealists and other artists who deconstruct the human figure. This terror is amplified by contemporary digital production tools. Digital processing reduces the anima of both the artist and their figurative subject into the abstract expression of digital artefacting, contrasting the organic with the artificial and the biological structure with its imaging data. My contribution to the 2018 Intermedia & Digital Arts (IMDA) Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) thesis exhibition Lucky Suns includes three-dimensional figure scans incorporated into laser-etched photographs, illuminated 3D-printed sculpture, and augmented-reality installation. Each of these works utilizes visual artefacting of digital processes as a metaphor for the evolution of digital culture. These pieces explore the consumption of the human by the digital, where the figures and the viewers both are engulfed by a black-box reality at once material and immaterial, a universe created in a binary language through which we must all now communicate, however impossible that demand may be. |
