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Research and Critical Reflection 2

In this critical reflection, I will discuss how digital technology is affecting our understanding of the contemporary human body and where we are defining its new limits. I will begin by addressing the tensions the body is being exposed to, reflecting on the state of our natural environment, and criticizing the influences of our societal model and our current inability to change. I will continue to present other effects that our interaction with digital technology has had on our relationships with our bodies and our perception of our place in the world. Then I will delve further into the concept of the glitch and apply its principles to discuss the limits of the body. I will end the first section of this reflection with a look at more inclusive concepts for our future and then reflect on new approaches and developments in my artistic process.

How does digital technology affect our understanding of the contemporary human body? What are the limits of this body?
“Despite declining in 2020, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions remained at 31.5 gigatonnes, which contributed to carbon dioxide reaching its highest ever average annual concentration in the atmosphere of 412.5 parts per million in 2020 — around 50 percent higher than when the Industrial Revolution began. In 2021, emissions increased (again) to nearly match their 2019 peak” (IEA, 2021).
A critique of the present
Our planet

If we do not change our ways the planet is on track to face a 2.7 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures over pre-industrial levels. Ice sheets are destabilizing, fresh water is becoming scare, and a record number of species are going extinct. (Duke, 2021) Some scientists doubt that climate change will wipe us out completely. Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, states that “it would be a real mistake to confuse whether or not climate change poses an extinction risk to humans with whether or not climate change poses a very real, present and intensifying risk to humans and to ecosystems.” (Times, 2021)

The "Dooms day clock” of 2022 indicates that we are just 100 seconds away from extinction. It was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists that uses the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the countdown to zero to convey the intensity of threats to humanity and the planet. It has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains. In 2016 it was at three minutes to midnight which was until then the closest that it had been since the early 1980s when there was a great fear of war. Now, in 2022 and last updated in March due to the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the doomsday clock is is just 100 seconds to midnight. (Chomsky, 2016; Mecklin, 2022)

 

Despite these looming scenarios, the discussion around climate change remains largely unresolved. “What strange form of intelligence is it that enables great accomplishments to be achieved but is unable to ask the question - will we survive and how can we ensure our survival?” (Chomsky, 2016). Noam Chomsky, former Professor of Linguistics at the MIT and one of the best-known linguists of our time, criticises that those acting against climate change are still off the mainstream as it is not the main topic in the electoral campaigns and seldom brought up in media commentary in his home country the US. What is discussed are "tweets at 3 am, various kinds of vulgarity, anything but serious problems, even though climate change is the most serious problem ever risen in human history” (Chomsky, 2016).

Why are we on such a destructive path and how do digital technologies and our social model affect our willingness and ability to collectively reverse the trend?

The cost of capitalist accumulation

According to philosopher and activist Silvia Federici capitalism has undermined the self sufficiency of every region and created a total economic interdependence, even among distant countries. While Globalisation generates the need for an unlimited exploitation of labor and the natural environment, she further states, that this capitalist primitive accumulation continues to require the degradation of human life and the reconstruction of social hierarchies and divisions on the basis of gender, race and age. (Federici, 2019)
It is the capitalist attack on humanities basic means of reproduction, the land, the house, and the wage to expand the global work force and reduce the cost of labor that has formed a global and impoverished labor force, which is “reduced to abstract labor, pure labor power, with no guarantees, no protections and (the worker) always ready to be moved from place to place and job to job” (Federici, 2019, p.18). This deprivation of collective property and of the right to self-sufficiency has led to a point where "all we have are the bodies we are housed in, gendered or otherwise”, glitch feminist Legacy Russell voices, she further explains that “under the sun of capitalism, we truly own little else, and even so, we are often subject to a complicated choreography dictated by the bureaucratic and rhizomatic systems of institutions” (Russell, 2020, p.10). Chomsky shares the critical view on the current model of state capitalist systems with the state playing a substantial role in economic development, production and research. He compares the concept of wage labour to that of chattel slavery except that today wage labour is temporary but the employee is still renting out himself and his time. (Chomsky, 2015)

In the industrialised countries people start to seek for alternatives to a life regulated by work and the market, “both because a regime of precarity work can no longer be a source of identity formation and because of their need to be more creative“ (Federici, 2019, p.195). There is a high demand to rethink the way humanity currently operates, to remould it in new ways and to open up new spaces to meet demands for a general rethinking of the priorities of our society. Federici demands to generate a deeper understanding of the natural constraints with which we operate on this planet. She states that “we have to search for new models of protest and new relations between human beings and between human beings and nature” (Federici, 2019, p.195). She thinks that our capitalist society has in the long term deprived the human body of its ways to connect and interact with nature and the environment, “for which no technological device has compensated” (Federici, 2019, p.191). We should start to acknowledge the cost of the technological innovations by which we are mesmerised and try to create a different social economic system. Chomsky lists several alternatives to capitalism which are self-management, the democratic control of institutions – whether their communities or workplaces or any others and alliances among them – federal arrangements, which are in his opinion all “perfectly feasible alternatives”, as there is “no political theory that tells us there is anything wrong with them” (Chomsky, 2015). He believes that the reasons for their rejection lie in their conflict with the structure of existing systems of power. (Chomsky, 2015)

 

"Unless we dramatically transform our way of life, climate change and other man-made perils will cause our civilization to crash," states the website of a new project called Earth´s Black Box that will record our planet's demise in minute detail. It will collect daily metrics, including average oceanic and land temperatures, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and biodiversity loss, data on land use, military spending, energy consumption and human population growth. In addition to this it will filter news headlines, social media posts, and information from key climate change conferences between heads of state. The solar-powered vault will be designed to withstand any catastrophe and will be placed in one of the most secure locations on Earth - Tasmania. The data will be stored on a giant, automated, solar-powered hard drive with a capacity to collect information for about 50 years. According to its website it will act as a silent observer to “provide an unbiased account of the events that (might) lead to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations, and inspire urgent action.” (Duke, 2021; Times, 2021)

Despite the fact that construction on the project has yet to begin, its algorithms are already working in a beta test that can be observed on the project's website. (Duke, 2021)

What could lead to an acceleration of measures taken to minimise climate change could be that the data contained in Earth's Black Box will be publicly available as a time capsule of climate information. (Duke, 2021)

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What is the role of data and digital technology in this search for a new structure and how do Computerisation and digital technologies influence our ways of engagement?

Digital technology

Being surrounded by all the advancements and conveniences modern technologies have provided us with it has become difficult for us to assess the full cost of any new forms of production. Otto Ulrich, a German sociologist, is of the opinion that only modern technology´s capacity to transfer its costs over considerable times and spaces paired with our consequent inability to see the suffering caused by our daily usage of technological devices “allow the myth that technology generates prosperity to persist” (Ulrich in Federici, 2019, p.190). New technologies have neither reduced the workweek nor the burden of physical work. We work now more than ever and in extreme cases even die from being overworked (see Japan: “death by work” in Federici, 2019, p.192). Digital labor is producing new levels of stress that are reflected by the epidemic of mental illnesses - depression, panic, anxiety, attention deficit, dyslexia - now typical in most technologically advanced countries like the U.S. The human-machine refuses to work in its new environment in which every move is being monitored, registered, and possibly punished. (Federici, 2019)

For Federici the new “social" tool of interconnectivity is an illusion as in her opinion it has just produced a “new type of isolation and new forms of distancing and separation” (Federici, 2019, p.192). For her the cost of Computerisation is much higher than the new gains from the information revolution in our knowledge-based society. We have lost our close connection to nature and thus our resistance against exploiting it as we opted from being surrounded by nature to being surrounded by closed walls. (Federici, 2019)

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The amount of time we now spend in front of a screen and our new ways of communicating through it may have weakened our social bonds and relations. Superficial and biased views are accepted and the value of immediate response has risen over content that is thought through. In a culture where efficiency is the ultimate goal, social solidarity and family relations are being weakened as caring for others is dismissed as inefficient.

A new individualism is on the rise, in which the common good is exchanged with the personal pursuit of a “good life” as the Internet gradually replaces more and more points of interpersonal contact. (Federici, 2019)

By loosing these points of contact we are exposed to a new kind of solitude. Artist Sherry Turkle argues in her work “Alone Together” from 2011 that “through our increased use of technology we remain connected but increasingly isolated from one another” (Russell, 2020, p.124). Artist Tom Worsfold understands the screen as a bodily appendage in more ways than one, as he often finds himself disturbed by the fact that he is a flawed, fleshy being of mortal matter. (Worsfold, 2021)

Richard Patterson expresses his feeling of displacement by depicting what he calls half-spaces and perceives digitalisation as an issue and affliction. That is why he creates “paintings to be of the “wind-down windows” variety, not the “Sat-Nav” screen variety” (Patterson).  

Legacy Russell objects. For her the communication via the Internet might alienate people that have always felt included in mainstream society but it has had the opposite impact on the lives of formerly marginalised groups. Russel defines the Internet as a space where an opening up of being can occur, where one can dare to be vulnerable whilst being protected from physical injury. (Russell, 2020)

In our current pursuit of more inclusion and acceptance of non-binary bodies we now start to expand our mainstream community and our gaze towards a society that extends a uniform appearance. We start to connect again by accepting our differences. The Internet can be a facilitator of transformative activity if we start to solve problems together and affirm ourselves again of our collective power.

To reconnect our relation with nature, with others, and with our bodies, would enable us not only to escape the gravitational pull of capitalism but “to regain a sense of wholeness in our lives” (Federici, 2019, p.189).

The glitched body and the body´s limits

A change occurs through the disruption of the present. For Russell, this tearing marks the beginning of a new structure. The tearing or the gliding towards a new condition or a new reality disturbs the homogeneous picture. The glitch is the antithesis of the normative. What influence does such external tension have on our body and how can this be visualised?

 

Starting the transformation with the body as the closest connection to ourselves and to others Russel defines its “in-between” as a core component of survival. For her there is no need for neither a masculine nor feminine, neither a male nor female body but for a spectrum across which individuals can feel empowered again to define themselves for themselves. (Russell, 2020) The Glitch holds the possibility to regain independent control over the body and thus also to counteract the normative pressure of capitalism. The body should no longer find itself under the pressure to fit “within a binary in order to comply with the prescriptions of the everyday.” (Russell, 2020, p.10)

It should be glitched, bended and in constant movement from the outset even if this movement triggers error. It then has the chance to become the catalyst to a variance of selfdom.

Theorist Nathan Jurgenson critiques that our new way of existing in a “digital dualism” would create a split of our identity into online selfdom and real life. For Russell the skin or the body we inhabit in the digital world ultimately influences and engages with our physical body. She refuses to define the life we are living in our organic body as the “real” life but instead as one AFK (away from keyboard). She addresses her ideas to those who are “en rout to becoming their avatars”, those who continue to play, experiment, and build via the Internet as means of strengthening the loop between online an AFK. (Russell, 2020) This loop is one of the central ideas that I am incorporating into my works. I think that the freedom to explore alternative realities should always lead back to the one reality we all share, which can only be modified if we dare to move AFK.

As “the idea of the body is inconceivably vast” (Anais Duplan  in Russell, 2020, p.41) we will have to practice to read others carefully as an exercise of trust, intimacy, belonging and homecoming. The glitched body opens itself up towards an outside and embraces new connections. Artist Vivian Greven reflects a life in the state of dualism in her paintings. She understands the character of our present times as being shaped by the internet and social media and thus dissolves the hierarchies between original, reproduction and simulation in her luminous compositions. (Kadel Willborn) She searches for new ways to express the feeling of interconnection and of getting in touch with each other through a digital screen. Her purely painted images concentrate on the “discrepancy between the beautiful surface and the pain of the body underneath” (Greven). Addressing gender politics she states that her painted bodies are about love and longing for an “unconditional yes to every existence.” (Greven)

This yes to every existence is also a leading force in Christina Quarles paintings. She uses the body very differently form Greven as she renders its shape in a state of visual chaos. It is the “disorganized body in a state of excess” Quarles states, that expresses her daily experience with ambiguity and “seeks to dismantle assumptions of our fixed subjectivity through images that challenge the viewer to contend with this.” Her work explores the universal experience of existing within a body, as well as the ways race, gender, and sexuality intersect to form complex identities. (Quarles) Unique examples of bodies that are building a bridge between its digital and organic form are the artists Stelarc and Neil Harbisson. Stelarc is known for pushing his body to its limits. He blurs the lines between technology and the body generating ‘contestable futures. (Criado; Fernandez, 2018) He does not perceive the body as given but rather as an architecture that can be rebuild and modified to extend its natural limits and directly connect to a data-driven-self. For him technology adjusts our operation and awareness in the world. He deliberately seeks to fragment his body and his senses to be able to distribute the body to "a place beyond the boundaries of its skin, beyond the local space that it inhabits." (Stelarc, 2016) “People are becoming portals of internet experience”, he states, “we are accelerated by machines we are enhanced by our instruments, our computational capabilities are amplified with new technologies so the body can be seen as a construct of meat, metal and code.” How does a glitched body that functions as a portal to code and information navigate the natural world? Self-proclaimed cyborg Neil Harbisson feels that, after having an antenna implanted in his cull that translates colours into sounds, “being united to cybernetics makes (him) feel that (he is) technology.” Surprisingly he also expresses that through this he is feeling connected to nature in a stronger way than before the adjustment as “the more you extend your senses, the more that you realise exists.” (Harbisson in Donahue). He understands his life's work in promoting a more inclusive world in which “othered" bodies as accepted as equal. The problem of non-binary bodies being “othered” is rooted in our current process of programming new creative technologies. There is whole compilation of 40 falsehoods programmers believe just about the parameter “names” that can be found here. Even if we would create thousands of boxes to choose from the one we are put into will always be outdated pretty soon. They do not define who we are, we are not our gender, our search history, or our data sets and posts and we have to leave the online space from time to time to free our minds from the bubbles recommendation systems aim to keep us in. To be able to participate on most social platforms it is still necessary to fit into these predefined parameters of a standardised name, ticking the gender box or alternatively identifying with the term “other”. Russel argues: “What is a body without a name? An error.” (p.75) “I am not Other. You name me Other.” (p.76)

 

By becoming more sensitive to each other and finding ways to break out of old patterns through a joint dialogue, we could define new goals and a new scale by which real progress can be measured.

Designing the future
Community and kinship

Can the images we put out into the world help us imagine and thereby build an alternate path towards a more inclusive and sustainable future?

 

Monika Bielskyte futurist researcher and founder of the protopian framework believes that science fiction has contributed massively to the fetishisation of a tech-controlled future that we are heading towards. It has made us believe that the future we should be thriving towards should be highly automated, led by technological advancements and by enhancing our limits of productivity through revolutionising the human body through mechanic or digital extensions. She states that these developments hold the threats of exploiting the resources of our planet and to create a world of social separation. For Bielskyte the capitalist model is based on the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet. She envisions a move past linear economies towards circular ways of being. (Bielskyte, 2022)

Founded in 2019 the central hope of the Protopia-collective is to facilitate a platform for creating glimpses into “radically hopeful futures, and to open up conversations and explorations about what it takes to get there. With all that we do, we want to challenge the alienating dystopian/utopian SciFi stereotypes, and to inspire, and be inspired by, what truly inclusive futures could be.” (Protopia, 2022) It acts as a collaborative cultural framework where there is no singular “future” trajectory but rather a vast scope of many alternative futures which are “continuously shaped not just by our actions but also by our inactions and our apathy” (Protopia, 2022).

Bielskyte percieves our collective futures imagination in a crisis as industrial markers of “progress” lead to dead ends, where the speed and quantitative aspects of our mechanical technologies have advanced but much of our lives remain informed by a multiplicity of biases and injustices of centuries prior. (Bielskyte, 2022) Our understanding of human community and our complex interdependence with all life on earth has been distorted by the narratives of “colonizing progress” and individualism and have blocked us from more expansive scientific inquiries and innovative discoveries (Heinrich in Protopia, 2022). The constitutive interaction between our bodies and nature should be restored, while a deprivatization of everyday life can break isolation and caring for others can become a creative task rather than a burden. (Federici, 2019)

“Protopia” solidifies the quest for a future that is inclusive and liveable for all – as any Utopia designed for the few can become a Dystopia for the many. (Bielskyte, 2022) Their new values are anchored in the principles of: plurality, community, celebration of presence, regenerative action & life as technology, symbiotic spirituality, creativity & emergent subcultures, and the evolution of cultural values. A fundamental aspect is also to support the voices of the disabled members of our society to ensure a fair environment for everyone to live in. (Protopia, 2022)

Reflections on my artworks
How can the glitched body be painted?
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Realityglitch 1

The idea of breaking up the limits of ​​the body, dissolving and melting it into a new free-form environment, and then reassembling itself again motivated me to paint this picture. Derived from my animation “Becoming”, which I created at the end of Unit 1, I wanted to organicize a lifeless, technical, artificial mass and then deconstruct it. I had previously explored statues in relation to the artificial ideal of the human body and mind, and related the statue to the concept of AI. That's why I chose a statue as the starting point for the composition. To glitch them I use Photoshop and digital brushes and decided to disguise the identities of the people as much as possible. Creating a reference digitally was a new process for me as I have tried to work without direct templates so far. I think it really advanced my process in terms of testing the compositions and colours beforehand but it was important to leave the template at some point so I could react unbiased and freely to the image in front of me.

 

Justin Mortimer says about the use of digital templates: “I have found myself making digital collages that are thrilling and very seductive – which I’d ​​love to paint – but I know that the paint will not behave like the pixels. For a painting to succeed, it must exist separately from that digital catalyst, to exist in its own discreet world.”


I deliberately removed both faces so as not to draw the viewer's gaze directly there and to pose a puzzle to the viewer by not specifying how the two people a related and feeling towards each other which did cause confusion by many viewers who asked me about this at the group exhibition at the Espacio Gallery. Mortimer, Brown and Greven all use the anonymization of their characters to keep their works more open to the viewer.
To quote Cristina Quarles: "Legibility teeters on the edge of lack and excess – when we lack information about a thing, it is vague. However, as information accumulates, the risk for contradiction increases and legibility tips into ambiguity."

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Justin Mortimer
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Vivian Greven
Glenn Brown

What I improved looking at my previous works is that I integrated more calm surfaces into the composition. The background is in motion, but this movement has an origin and a unified direction. Previously I've swept my swings in myriad directions and I think the new work has become more inviting now with more stillness and more "orderly deformation".

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What I would still like to work on in the future is to achieve different surface effects, i.e. working with sharpening and blurring (Mortimer) or varying my level of detail in areas (Brown). Another aspect I would like to improve is to mix my colours more clearly and to place them with higher contrast so that there are sharper edges between the elements / bodies (Greven). I think it would also be nice to incorporate more targeted intense colour areas that bring more luminosity to the work.

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Holding On

Breaking down the boundaries of the body and thereby connecting people was my starting point for this work as well. The glitch here is driven by the real motion the characters are in. Their blurring in front of the viewer's eyes is increased in the painting and increases the intensity of the movement towards each other. I tried to reapply the same glitch effect to create consistency as a series. The two figures run out towards the edges of the canvas and connect with it, fixing the composition in format. It should become unrecognizable where the boundaries of both bodies begin or end. You find them in a dark room that also reacts to movement.

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Daniel Richter
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Vivian Greven
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David Szauder
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Ann-Marie James

With this work I managed to paint very quickly and intuitively. I deliberately blended less and deliberately left the transitions between the colour nuances harder. As a result, more movement has flowed into the composition and it still appears to be made of one piece. The incompleteness of some areas allows smaller and more detailed areas to shine. I think the strong contrast helps the composition a lot and the deliberate placement of patches of color breaks up the surface a bit more than in the previous work. I think I took a step in the right direction here and tested a collection of tighter visual parameters further.

 

Through my research, I later came across the works of Daniel Richter, whose visual language is in some aspects similar to mine. What excites me about it is how he runs through and breaks through his surfaces with coarse brushstrokes. I wonder if these only work because he places very simple and easily graspable shapes. I think it would be interesting in the future to reverse the light-dark contrast and surround a dark center with light shapes, as in Vivian Greven's work.

Even if I have succeeded in dissolving and melting the body's boundaries, I am still not satisfied with the connection between the work and the digital space. Although I hint at this somewhat with the light outline and light blue edges, the glitch doesn't break up the image surface angularly enough to appear digital. I think with the example of one of Szauder's works it becomes clearer that it has originated from a digital influence.

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Space Fracture/ WIP

In this composition I was imagining a body falling into a half-space that is part digital part organic. The body is also in a state of rupture as it is conflicted wether it should take up its organic or digital form to survive in this unstable environment which is why the fleshy skin tones keep flickering over her metallic body. She is surrounded by artificial energy that lights the space up and bounces back from the various objects and edges of fragmented surfaces.

The human finds himself in an adaptive and agile environment which resembles the digital space for me. The deconstructed and reconstructed space of a mixed reality is the central element of my composition. For this work I implemented my digital scans for the first time. Incorporating the scans trailing edges into my composition reflects missing pieces in this kind of reality. What was a difficult decision to make here was that within the level of elaborating the figure it had to had a "gendered" body and I tried to move around the aspect of the shin colour or ethnicity as I did not want to exclude any viewer. I still think it is very difficult o decide on what kind of body to depict in my paintings. As I do not portrait a specific person I have to decide upon every aspect of the figure and I think about what it could be associated with. I guess I have to distance myself a bit further from the perspective of the viewer and try be more content with what I want to paint, see and reflect in the bodies I am depicting.

 

I experimented with different techniques of applying paint and applied the paint much thicker without blending. It catches the eye a bit more than the flat areas and I think I still have to insert it in the upper area to draw the eye upwards again. I like the unexpected color palette of this work, even if the yellow-orange part still seems a bit overpowering because there is still a lot of contrast missing in the rest of the work and I still have to add the small green fractures on top of the white spaces. As this is a work in progress not very close to being resolved I still have the possibility to adjust and overpaint certain pieces.

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Richard Patterson
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Justin Mortimer
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Marc Pratts

What I like so far are the vivid and clean colours in this piece which help a notion of something digital to come up. I think it is a big improvement in terms of dividing colours and shapes from each other. What also works well in my opinion are the bright white shapes that structure the space with their sharp edges. I am also happy with the way the room is distorted and the elements seem transformed from something organic into something surreal – even if the green glitched leafs are still missing at this state to cross the lines in the bottom part and break up some white shapes.

I think this work could be enriched by some areas that are blurry like the smoky environments that Mortimer builds around his detailed bodies. I still tend to explain all the shapes that I am making to the eye of the viewer and maybe some confusion about where a colour has its origin or where a shape ends could be new effects to think about. Even though I tried to add thicker sections of paint to the painting I am still a bit unsure if I would like to apply this technique more intense or not at all. I really enjoy the contrast of Pattersons mix of blurriness and impasto and maybe the blurry aspect is what could help the more impasto sections in my painting to look fresher. During my research I stumbled upon the young painter Marc Pratts who is concerned with similar issues and topics as I am and also uses elements of collage in his compositions. I think his paintings have a different way of collapsing space from the way I approach it but I think a comparison is quite interesting and helps me to realise what my specific visual elements and approaches are.

Reclaiming the Infinite Vast / WIP

My concept for this work was the feeling of an unstoppable pull that engulfs the world around it. I wanted to let the body become a material and dissolve, bend and connect its borders. A certain limitlessness of the body is indicated and old norms and ideals are dissolved. At the same time, the organic self and the digital self become one while at the same time canceling each other out. A blurring of the self with technology is happening as the bodies are spinning more and more towards the center. For me, the spiral symbolizes the feeling of losing control of time and attention as one is being drawn and captured by the alluring qualities of the digital space. It also hints at development that is set out to end and erasure of all content on the canvas returning to a vacuum of nothingness.

I am again remixing the sculpture to reimagine its context and to build new visual worlds with it. “To remix is to rearrange, to add to, an original recording. The spirit of remixing is about finding ways to innovate with what’s been given, creating something new from something already there. (…) original recordings (…) are materials that can be reclaimed, rearranged, repurposed, and rebirthed (…) creating new “records” through radical action.” (Russell, 2020, p.133) The bodies open up to be consumed by the glitch in the shape of a spiral and are again I a mixed-state between flesh and metal. The skin is warping and occupies new spaces just to be absorbed again in a motion that cancels details and shapes towards its black hole-like center.

Vivien Zhang
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Christina Quarles
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Matthew Stone
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Flora Yuknovich

I really enjoy working on this piece and carving different shapes out with new details and sharper contrasts. I think the white surface around the composition works very well to give it a clean and digital cut out look. The emptiness also allowed me to add many details in the coloured ares which would have normally overpowered the eye and would have made the image to heavy in my opinion. I really enjoy building up a 3D shape from a completely flat background here. The process of painting reminded me a lot of rendering elements in the 3D software where the default background is either white or black. I would like to explore further how I can expand the boundaries of the body on a white plane surface. For me it reflects a displacement and an oddness of ones surroundings. The human seems removed from its connection to the natural world.

Comparing this work in progress to some of my relevant context I still notice that my colour palette is quite muted in this piece. I think I connect more to the sheerness of Quarles colour application and Flora Yuknovichs concept of reimagining colour palettes of the past in a contemporary context. What could be improved for the next painting is that I could add the illusion of more depth between the layers like Vivien Zhang. Maybe I could use drop shadows or a structure from low saturation to high saturation. I think I am still quite gentle with breaking and bending the human body and looking at Christina Quarles work motivates me to let go a bit more in distributing anatomical changes all over the body.

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In Unit 3 I would like to finally bring my digital works and renderings into the three-dimensional world and create a space of glitch and dualism by painting on top of them or cutting and combining them in a physical collage. I think it could help me loosen up my painting process and to be more relaxed in trying out more radical shapes and glitches.

I was somehow reluctant to print images as I felt that the act of painting gave much more to the image which a a digital print could not translate.

Being inspired by Rainers "overpaintings" I plan to use the time at Wilsons Road to produce more works of mixed nature not just of mixed visual origin. Scanning the body and just showing the skin without internal contents seems like an interesting idea to me. I think if printing the head on a larger format and then reintroducing skin-coloured brush strokes and thicker paint to break up the "flawless" surface of the print.

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Head Space 2
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Head Space 1
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Arnulf Rainer
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Matthew Stone
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