(MADT301) Infinity Island - Artist Statement/ Project Statement

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When I first decided to pursue Architectural Technology, it was because I knew I had an affinity for drawing and construction: anything that involved working with my hands. I soon realized that technologists work for the most part on computers, and that if I did not learn how to adapt then I would not achieve my goal.

 

Infinity Island is a testimony to how I have moved as quickly as I needed to throughout my education and my professional career. Rather than fearing what the world might come to if machines took over, I found ways to modify my thinking and make the machine work for me.

 

These days, digital work is a part of almost every artistic process that I undertake. My paintings and found objects are manipulated, in combination with advanced rendering software that make for custom surfaces in 3-dimensional videos, that the audience feels as though they could touch. I want to move in a direction that dematerializes art, but that still uses materials when the affect is necessary in evoking an emotional connection with the viewer.

 

To take this process even further, I used the same building from my imaginary world called Infinity Island, and I had it printed into a 3D sculpture. Another variation are the sketches from this model that I had printed and used as patterns for machine sewing. The concepts I am playing with here are combining computers and machines to create work that is never truly finished; I want to explore infinite human potential as an extension to technology rather than seeing them as two opposing forces. Through play and experimentation, I am looking at the stages of processing and post-processing and applying technology in ways that may be familiar, but that continue to push boundaries. 

 

Philosophy that has inspired my recent work is the New Games Movement from the 1970s, which as a result of protesting the Vietnam war and eliminating the need for competition, was instead encouraging people to understand their potential by working hard and working creatively. Writer George Leonard was involved in this movement and was the one who first coined the phrase “human potential”. Founder of Tiltfactor, Mary Flanagan explores the idea of how artists see games as “frameworks for thinking about culture.” (49) I believe that my work in Infinity Island is largely influenced by paradoxical video game landscapes, and that my artistic practice is informed by an approach that is both intuitive and playful. I want the lack of humans in this nonhuman environment to raise questions of the serene and the ominous in how we plan on approaching landscaping and architecture, thus intervening with the natural world and in consideration of the nonhuman.

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Works Cited:

 

Flanagan, Mary. “Creating Critical Play” Artists Re:Thinking Games. Eds Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, and Corrado Morgana. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010, pp 49-53.

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