project statement
I’m searching for “dirt”— the digital image that has fallen in the crack, lying between worlds. These outliers reveal the system from which they’ve been rejected, their relevance deemed marginal at best. We look to the Internet to show us the world, but it tends to lead us further from truth. I like telling what some would call lies, and I'm unconvinced that this distinction matters. The images I’ve excavated from an online landscape resist categorization, creating an erratic assemblage of their own. Within the archive, the photoshopped image blends in; it materializes. It is just as real as any other. Looking at our image-world from the outside of it, we reveal its bounds, or lack-thereof. Everything means what I say it means. Or, what you say it means. Seeing that my reality differs from yours, reveals an in-between that questions both of our logic. Fragments of inner thoughts and confessions lie at the core of the work. It is this communication at the center, that won’t hold.
*Artist Talk, UTC BFA Exhibition*
In the presence of an AI that draws and writes and speaks, I am pursuing unpredictability. Investigating patterns and irregularities, I take notes consisting of fragmented conversations, billboard language, and strange happenings. I consider these findings "dirt" -- the fallout that resists categorization. These outliers reveal the systems from which they’ve been rejected. William Butler Yeats tells us, in a 1920s poem, "the centre cannot hold." Certainly, it will not. Things fall apart... stability moves to instability. The systems that should provide order are failing to do so.
Through design, I'm studying the malleability of language and the arbitrary nature of signs and meaning. I am devoted to the humble text and image. I believe that to say one thing and not another is a choice, and within that choice there is meaning.
It is a special agreement that we have-- to call the red, shiny fruit an "apple." I'm using the image-text pairing to re-orient our perception of language. Breaking it open, in order to expose its almost undetectable sense of truth. Of course, it is difficult to see the invisible systems that organize the world around us. They feel just as real as anything else.
My work focuses on in-betweens and outliers. The spam image, the typo... charming, low-budget signage. These moments are special because of the feeling we get in discovering them.
These “in-betweens” are aberrations, their out-of-place-ness creating rips in reality. It is the spaces between what we know where we may unearth our longest kept secrets.
I’m exploring the space between truth and myth, digital and analog, between the shiny red fruit and the apple that it signifies... between image and world.
The richest form of communication is one that is most open. Re-fashioning language, poetry tells us things we have already known and felt but haven't known how to say. There are no new ideas, only new ways of making them felt. These ideas are ancient, uncovered by new combinations and extrapolations that we find by investigating our feelings and questioning our logic.
In order to fully understand something, it helps to see it from the outside. For my thesis project, I have created what I’d call a map, or maybe a constellation... documenting the sparkling scraps I've excavated from the Internet's outer crust. I have organized and labelled my findings, presenting them here as evidence of a world that is specifically mine. From this data, we may recognize patterns and draw conclusions. We may learn that our realities and ideas of "truth" correlate, or do not.
To quote Audre Lorde, "Poetry is not a luxury," but a vital necessity. The archive I've assembled acts as a phenomenological inkblot. Our associations with it revealing truths about ourselves, our realities, and the systems that attempt to hold order.