VIRTUAL MATERIAL

VIRTUAL MATERIAL, 2012 – 2022, images, videos, installations, projections, public art, textiles. Film is light stamped in material time. Material is a form of time. Within the realm of imaging, the bodied digestion of visual stimulus forms a bond between the human being and their environment. As a landscape impresses and reforms the being, the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity is looked at through the radical changes digital culture has made. As ideas for individualism and a friendly nature press societies into polarised bulges and distortions, observations and questions about human perception are posed through the series developed over the past 10 years. The works in Virtual Material are composed to look at what this actually means for people and our relationships to notions of the Virtual and the Material, the imagination, of what is or is not. Inspired by Kafka’s words; “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds”, Virtual Material seeks to transform the nature of the photographic image into a physically experienced, dimensional space, and as an installation as structured with photographs, videos, projections, as media explores depth, space, panel, free-standing forms and contingencies.  

 

VÆRE LIEF, 2020, 4:47 single channel video, on the nature of belief and the meaning of beloved.

 

AFJORDANCE, 2019, 13:47 single channel video, soundtrack composed by the digital armature joint movements referencing an open source audio library of wind. The video was developed through artistic research on the complexities emerging in Artificial Intelligence, the ways humans create mirrored structures, and affordances in the notions of Intelligence itself. The video was developed from Solfege Souche cultivated over research conducted 2015 – 2018. Exhibited in California, Norway, and Italy. 

 

SOLFEGE SOUCHE, 2018, single-channel video (3 formats), sound composition and arrangement. “Ut queant laxīs resonāre fībrīs; Mīra gestōrum famulī tuōrum; Solve pollūtī labiī reātum, Sancte Iōhannēs.”  A Solfège Souche is by definition the root of a forgotten connection with nature. In times of rapidly increased use of technology, humans face increased stimulation and variables on age old questions in ethics and morality. In an effort to portray a dynamic relationship with nature, instead of dominance over nature, the Butoh movements recreate ways lifeforms cut down in the forest continually find ways to reach towards light. This space framed in the video presents a body moving amongst an autumnal forest, merging and emerging from light and shadows. The body draws lines through movement; binaural beats compose the soundtrack. The pitches register at markers in time, reminiscent of ear trauma or tinnitus. The Solfège Souche video is situated at the intersection of dance, performance, video art, projection, embodied cognition research, and resonance study. The artistic research and pedagogical development around the project asks the questions: Are our cultural and bodily movements dangerous if we do not understand what we stand to lose? In what ways do sounds move and change forms from within the body and around? 

 

MOUVEMENTS, 2015-2018, photography, public artwork, textiles. Exhibitions at Vérité and Akers Mek in Oslo, Norway, 100 x 140 cm, Epson Archival Ink, mounted on kapa. The Mouvements series creates a serenely subtle vision of iridescent wave forms. Appearing as an oily surfaced water, the sublime iridescence of the forms is highlighted by minuscule film grains amplified after film scanning. Water’s mutable quality, beauty and connection to eros are activated by a hypnotic colour palette used in screen technology. Viewing distances engage viewers’ senses of stillness and movement, and of the ways appearances can obfuscate and reveal, expand or contract. As oil and water can be considered allegorical elements for technocratic times, the reference to water as a reflective and moving surface invites imagination of the etheric realms presence hovering upon the images themselves. Inspired by Umberto Eco‘s ideas on late modernity, in Chronicles of a Liquid Society, the ways images are read as inverses within embodied cognitive connections, are realised within the viewer as malleable surfaces of memory.

 

BORA, 2018, 4:50 single channel video, looking at the ways landscapes become impressed through vision in different colour spectrums. The Nordic forest is transformed into a tropical affect with music evocative of shopping centers and marketing videos. Depth and flatness is presented for the viewer to imagine what it might be to see the mystic and elementals formations in their everyday encounters.

 

TEKNOVISUELL EXPERIENCE, 2015 – 2017, Digital Image, 2015/6, sizes start at 61,04 x 76,2 cm (24 x 30in), Teknovisuell Experience involves several layers in the materiality of the image, systems and processes in imaging, the vision-body relationship, and ways civilisations form understandings of nature. From an empirical, materialist philosophical standpoint, the works reflect on age-old discussions between Platonic and Sophist ideas, and the places spiritual and scientific ideas are permitted. Through the emphasis on the ethereal nature of screen-based technologies, the Teknovisuell Experience Details take-up these conversations both through the processes in which they were created and in the results of the viewers interactions and memories with images. By engaging the physical body with the vision, the distance in viewing engages viewers’ bodies in the opportunity to look at processes otherwise invisible to users of screen-based technology, but evident to builders of technology such as R&D, the coder, manufacturer and marketer. The details in Teknovisuell Experience were composed of the decomposition of images up and downloaded through social media channels; 7 times for each image. The final images reconstitute a representation, highlighting the way images become a form of cultural ritualisation. By further manipulating the image to highlight degraded visual qualities, and print at large scale or clip sections out as fragments, the various installation formats available engage viewers in contemplation of the areas in an increasingly liquid society. The scale and application of the image evokes motifs and patterns found in traditions of totems and textiles. Still images applied as wall coverings, pillars, scrolls or flags. Digital gifs of the images afford exhibition on screens and move static light reflections, creating visually ghostly movements.

 

STOP BATH, 2017, 30:45 single channel video, original soundtrack. The video looks at Lacan’s concepts of flickering and screen memories, and the structures of narrative through the elements of nature and a digitally cast coloured vision. 

 

 

 

BLAST,2014, 3:16 stop-motion video, installation, Culver City, CA, USA. Materials: Ready-made glass bear coin bank, institutional pink antibacterial hand soap, and photographs. The artwork was made within the context of studying at an art school heavily influenced by a consortium of Frankfurt School ideologies. The stop-motion video loops in endless rotation, where the glossy edge of the bear form performs the barrier between the backdrop evocative of nuclear blasting test sites. The quirky and spooky movements of stop-motion, indicated the structures established during WWII are animated and reanimated in an endless loop by the imaginations of viewers today. The suggestion the sanitisation material (antibac soap) would leak out the top, if the bear bank was turned on end hovers as a possibility. 

 

 

SONIDOS, 2014, digital images and GIFS composed of analogue photography and visualisations of audio files. Sonidos is part of Virtual Material. Virtual Material exploits as many aspects of photography and engages in a multiplicity of subjects including water, stones, forests, technology, vision, body, perception, ethics, joy and care. Virtual Material works include: Mouvements, Teknovisuell Experience, Sonidos, Ultraviolet Forest, and a number of videos and installation artworks as prints, projections, wall coverings, acrylic prints, garments.

 

 

Appearing, 2012, 102x102cm (40x40in), Gaussian Forest, 2013, 102x102cm (40x40in), Moiré Montreal, 2015, 102x102cm (40x40in), What was is still, 2013, 102x102cm (40x40in), iPad Still-Life, 2015, Utopian Sleeping Mound, 2012, Domestic Daisy Chain Solutions, 2012, Archival prints on matte paper, acrylic, various sizes and installations.