Collisions

A visual response to ever-increasing polarisation

For me, the biggest threat to humanity – aside from Climate Change – is that which comes from increasing polarisation. The ability for us to see someone else’s point of view, to empathise, to think about surrounding context always serves us better, yet more and more I see a unwillingness to see another points of view.

This is particularly true seeing the reaction to the growing field of AI, especially in respect of its use in an artistic context. Yet these tools can offer us new ways to imagine, to think and create. These new techniques don’t exist outside of other techniques and practices, but merge and become entangled with all that we’ve already learned and continue to learn as artists together with the yet unknown. They collide and coalesce into new branches and paths that we might journey down.

This series of works – presented in three volumes – is a visual response to this idea. The practice and use of combinations of seemingly disparate things has always been at the heart of my process, ever since I first started creating and mixing breakbeats from obscure vinyl I would find in second-hand record stores. That mentality – making new things from the ready-mades that surround me – has been a consistent thread in my work, only now I use software, networks and algorithms in place of vinyl. You’ll see through this series my fascination with not just technology but also systems gleaned from the natural world such as mycorrhizal networks, lichen and microscopic bacteria together with man-made objects such as communication satellites, consumer electronics and other ephemera. These are forms and objects created from the pre-existent and the never-was; to show the beauty that might arise when expanding the scope of our world view and to provoke and question what it means to be an artist in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

The series of works were released by Makersplace.