JONATHAN MORSE

original digital

CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2018

4 artist show curated by Jonathan Morse, exhibiting artist and guest curator

 

ECOTOMES (transitions between ecosystems), a quiet room in a sea of interactivity.  Photography’s invention caused a shout: “from this day painting is dead”.  New media is evolving media; from stones and pencils to paintbrushes and presses and onward to virtual reality, artists-cyborgs use available technology to make their mark.  Every iPhone image relies upon millions of lines of code; every image we make (and see) involves millions of neurons.  Cameras and computers are prostheses for the artist, in a good way: not to replace but to augment what it means to be human.  Photography has not depicted what is “real” since it’s inception; that train left long ago.  But it retains its evocative nature to simulate the real (a construct of our brains processing visual intake) when contrasted with digital marks.  Here we air the ongoing dialog between our organic selves and our digital allies, and influences.

 

In a world flooded with images artists are now directors and producers, (re)structuring information based on expanding digital skillsets, editing techniques that cannot remain static. I accept that I am an entry-level cyborg artist, man and machine in collaboration just as tools have amplified human abilities for millennia.  My digital avatars take my hand and guide me through the digital divide, enabling a confluence of visual sources and personal influences in a process of construction and deconstruction through which the past becomes the new.  Just another pencil, “new media” joins the continuum of human mark-making.   Florals and palms competing with digital marks stand in for an evolving struggle between our organic selves and the AI/robotic future we are hurtling towards…Our daily lives may seem routine, so how nice to find that in our artspace we can paint caves again, or simply howl at the moon.