To close out 2018, I launched two Instagram-specific/-sited/-exclusive expositions at the AFH I-gram portal, Valubl. I have been practicing in the social media platform, since February. The three-window grid format (how Instagram appears on my desktop monitor) presents some fun parameters for arranging images. There are many examples of elegant and witty design approaches available. Over the years, through many formats and platforms, I’ve developed my own sensibilities for displaying blocks of still or moving pictures on the web. I almost never like the constraints the major players and their marketing/engineering/design teams settle on. Their interests are rarely mine. GUI, UX and the other buzzwords dry brush over the real grift and graft installed in the fun and friendly squares and malls of the sharing economy. Culture, as it is defined for the utilities of outfits like Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, is oxymoronic, an empty term, generic fluff. Or to put it another way, the platform is conceived as a machine, a culture generator, an empty container, a culture container, an exchange, a culture switchboard. There is a lot of hype, critique, deconstruction and so forth attaching to ubiquitous, networked soc.med at this point. The stream of immaterial content that coincides with Instagram and other portals is pointless to try to fathom, it is so vast, and in service to so many ends. It is virtually like a metropolis, a New York City, now, a sprawling feature of the branded topology, in that there is too much for any individual to adequately comprehend. However, like all such outcrops in any kind of topology, natural and/or artificial, we can be certain it will transform and/or disappear, eventually. For the time being, please enjoy the efforts I have made at testing Instagram, utilizing it, and finally appropriating it for 4D art production and project(-ion) purposes.
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WOVENFORM [Shipwreck]
Artist Statement: "the skeletal remains of a century-old shipwreck; a fragment in foamy wash."
On Christmas Day, my family and I visited the shipwreck of the Peter Iredale at Fort Stevens State Park. The recent storm surf had piled mounds of kelp on the beach. In my 4D perspective, these kelp piles serve as lovely natural examples of wovenform. I shot the source photos with my old smartphone, then applied minimal processing in Photoshop. These ten images represent the first stage of conditioning the visual phenomena for 4D art purposes. We stopped to photograph the elk in the yard on the return drive to Astoria [OR]
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HRMNUTIK-POLY-INK [Code Duello]
In 2013 I undertook a residency in Pine Plains, NY hosted by Chashama. The ChaNorth AiR program is interesting. We shared cooking tasks, etc., and the org-orientation was real green. I focused on producing two sets of ink on polyester paintings, one small + one large format. @shanekandy joined me for the last week or two after his second Voyage of the Hippo summer trip. We collaborated on some big pour/press/pull attraction pieces that would be exhibited in "Code Duello" at David Lusk Gallery Nashville in 2014. In this set of images, I focused on details of the p/p/p paintings, and the buttery Hudson Valley light shining through the studio windows. I'm adding a few samples of other pieces in the series for reference.
