Yesterday I was wondering whether it would be feasible to construct a series based on an idea for a geeky yet ironic semiotic art form. The structure would organize a selection of handpicked words into a charlatan mathematical formula.
I intend to call this series “formulaic Worldviews.”
Its forged semantic composition into a construed syntax invites the viewer to participate and reassess the denotations one takes for granted while critically analyzing not only what is seen—the connotation I presented—but also what one self understands and how meaning dynamically comes into existence.
The process behind these works is a simplistic, non-obtrusive and intangible media technology hacking with an abstract artistic result. As in a petri dish one can culture microorganisms, these works are a culture of media.
This is a first selection of a series I have entitled “architectural orphans:” abstractions of ubiquitous but ignored nooks, cracks or micro objects in otherwise often visited locales. I aimed to focus on small deteriorations or faults within these same architectural structures.
These catalysts for abstraction are parts of common architectural objects Within Beijing buildings (i.e walls, doors, closets, etc) combined with the play of light and shadow presented within the original spacial setting.
The photographs were taken in a guerrilla-styled low-profile manner. Error upon error, while not creating inferiority but rather establishing grounds for new creations; new artistic life.
Their oddity of spacial sensation is abstractly and “organically” created by the deconstruction and recontextualization of their source (i.e ripping away walls and shadows into small contrasting strips of minute color and flattened texture) and the “hacking” of the media.
The source images were used as raw material within an organically following editorial process. From a linear techno-centric point of view this process evolved in an unorthodox manner; a manner unintended for the surface purposes of the used media (i.e. the standard software & hardware of the used mobile machinery). The unorthodoxy lies in the fact that these sources were manipulated by using this 1 technology in a manner it was not supposed to be used (in this case the simple camera function within an iPhone).
I enjoy the tension between their banal heritage (i.e a unimpressive wall) and their mysterious abstraction they resulted into.
The process was finalized while on the move from one location to the next by animasuri’11 within Beijing during the month of March 2011.
“What [does] it [mean] to survive, to produce, to labor and to create, within a world system whose major economic impulses and cultural investments are pointed in a direction away from you, your country or your people[?]…
[The] neglect [of the peripheries, margins, the off-center, themes and topics that had lain dormant] can be a deeply negating experience , oppressive and exclusionary, and it’s spurs you to resist the polarities of power and prejudice, to reach beyond and behind the inviduous [sic] narratives of center and periphery.” (Bhabha. 1994. p xi)
