The Shock of the Tangible

Worst case scenario for an overly digitized human conscious / the loss of haptic sensibilities.  Forgetting what physical objects are / mean.  Absolutely fascinated / terrified by this scene.

Gamer talks about design, human interaction, and things looking man-made in Minecraft.

Some kind of new anthropomorphism / notion of collaboration.

The very nature of the game has changed.

Sci fi seems to be the only thing that makes the most sense these days.

An IHop Conversation about Everything

We were at IHop and started talking about counter-cultures and two questions came up. Has there been a counter-culture since the 1990's, furthermore, has there been a counter-culture since the advent of the Internet? Sure theres things going on, but are they radical reactions and true rejections of a status quo?

I was born in the late 1970's and grew up a teenager in the mid-90's. As most folk tend to situate an identity around a particular decade, mine was then. At the time it was the decade of no identity. We had nothing, no war, no economic anxiety, etc. We were Generation X.

Consider though everything that was going on then. There was multitude of expressions happening all at once. Sure, many stemmed from previously established counter cultures, but the things going on in the 90's seemed to be more tangential, defined, and objectively separated. Enter me grasping for anything beyond suburbian idles. Skateboarding seemed to welcome and encompass, Hip Hop, Industrial, New School Punk, Techno, Gothic, Emo, and the list goes on. I am a culmination of many things at once.

More important than any musically based genera of counter-culture, was the occurrence of the Internet as it was made public also in the 1990's. Only now, approximately twenty years later, are we understanding how influentially changed our lifestyles and culture have become due to this pervasive invention. What was called Generation X would be more apt to be called Generation Cross-Over /Transition.

The conversation from there lead into the continually astounding and interesting circumstances of the Internet itself. I have spent a fair amount of time in the past two years or so being somewhat stunned by this medium. As if I had not been accustomed to it since 1994, my last year of high school, my first year of college, as well as the first time I had seen, used, or experienced this thing, I apparently have finally woke up from its numbingly technological and magnificent effects on the human condition.

I have been stuck in a state of awe by this ominous power of media, networking, and communication. Frozen in possibility and equally frustrated with not knowing how to comprehend it, how to use it, and what its doing to me. I had written the Internet off as a complete opposite to my previously tangible existence, and concluded that the world was now insanely confusing and at the very least the beginning of the end of the world.

Possibly it was the soothing pancakes that up until this point had caused the utmost fear in my primitive psyche to freak out at the very mention of this digital divide, but for the first time the idea of confusion was set to ease. For the first time in history, we have the answers to everything whenever and whenever we want them. Whats to be confused about?

If the internet is nullifying any human outward expressions, it is therefor doing something internal. From a creative persons survey of things going on in the physical world, I see a return to quality in things made. Craft and design are ever more considered these days. TV is better, writing is more predominate, music is more composed, human connections are felt to be more important.

The Interent has set a mirror of self of which to reflect our intentions. We are moving from quantity of expressions to quality of expressions. We are refining our selves, albiet quietly and slowly at the moment. This is a stage of self-consciousness, self-awareness, a maturity in growth. When we see a person go through this stage in their life it is a powerful moment, one that inevitably changes that person forever.

I would like to believe that is what is happening now. The Interent pushes us to ask better questions.

The Blank Canvass

Everything is new. The social and cultural context that creative people, artists, and for that matter humans, live in is exceedingly newer with every passing day. This is due to digital material, the Internet and Virtual Reality. As with all new technologies and things, these digital interfaces have a way of influencing how we think, act, perceive, understand and otherwise see our selves, challenging the previous standards and notions of how things have been.

Progress comes in waves, but this time around things are very, very different. It really comes down to our consciousness as it has been developed by the materials which formulate the environments and worlds around us. For a very long time, more than a few thousand years, our external world, the environment we adapted from, was matter made, or comprised of atoms. Further more, material was of some degree either hard or soft, and we, being the manipulators of the natural environment, molded, fused, burned, twisted, melted, bent or any other number of action words, changed those materials to suit our survival and technological needs. The environment and the materials came before us.

Now though, we have a very different medium and that is bits, code, ones and zeros - digital text, forms, and space as seen on screens - also known as the Internet and VR. This medium is untouchable and yet has had such a profound impact on us and our lives. That statement alone may appear transparent, but could also be considered the most improbable. How does a non-material entity influence anything? In what ways will we have to shift our understanding of natural studies? Will there be a day when we have Virtual Studies, Virtual Philosophies, or Virtual Sciences? This material we produced, and with it we produce unnatural environments, virtual realities we live in to some degree.

Artists have been working with the influences of VR for some time now. The technology was rudimentary in the late 1970's though 1990's, but today it's getting more common, influencing our way of thinking. Digital technologies, including the Internet, are re-formatting how we interact with each other, but furthermore, it is challenging our notions of identity in major ways. It is also changing our notions of basic foundational elements such as form and space. As there is no delineation between digital form and digital space, as they are both produced from bits, the notion of self also loses distinction as it exists in digital environments. What digital entity separates the notions of me, a chair, and the space between the two, if it is all coded with the same material, literally produced with the same kind of non-material? Furthermore, how does a digital material, a non-material, an untouchable entity, distinguish one idea of what a person is from another? What is the color of digital skin?

Here-in-lies a unique situation for the artist. What does one focus on if everything is the same and infinitely possible? What distinguishes focus, characterization, and furthermore, what establishes judgement? It used to be that an artist had a point of focus of which to culminate a confidence around or for. The artist had a particular interest based in a material, a process, or even a concept could help them to separate some thing from the other. And that is how things were. Things were able to be separated, focused on, studied, and held accountable unto themselves. This is based on natural studies and categorization.

The influence of digital material and VR nullifies this objectified reasoning. Digital material is an amorphous blob. Code is code is code. It is neither hard nor soft. It is our naturally formed inclinations that relay a false illusion of sameness between a coded chair and the coded living room it "resides" in. This amorphous material creates amorphous thought as well as amorphous and unfocused perception.

It is one thing to have a confidence in one thing and do that as an artistic practice, whether that be a material, a process, or a concept. It is quite another thing to try and grow a confidence around the entirety of all things, at all times, all at once, all of which are rendered with the same material and produced with the same process. Where does one begin? Where does one end?

Clay Statement, 2012.

Clay, as a physical substance, persists in sustaining our material consciousness even within the context of a clean, user-friendly, and technologically based virtual age. I find this dichotomous phenomenon very intriguing. In the hands of the maker, clay is being influenced by the ambiguous context of virtual reality. Outdated technologically, yet analogous to the infinite possibilities of digital form, the amorphous qualities of clay continue to serve as a relatable medium for interpretation. I am interested in how digital material will influence our notion of physical form in reciprocal and possibly reactionary manners.
My practice reconsiders function as being more than utility by extending its meaning into the experiential need to comprehend with our hands; ceramic objects are the accepted petrifications of the human experience as it was previously recorded in soft clay. As the notion of the object advances digitally, it is my belief that archiving experiences tangibly will continue to define human nature, and in the context of the virtual age, is increasingly important to do so.

SOLO Show

Funded, Curated, Attended, and Works made by Jason Lee Starin. Limited engagement.

Starin says of Starin, "Good show. But I think this guy might sit around a lot by himself, looking at the Internet, and Googling himself. It felt weird needless to say. Glad I went."

Stands, Trophy (Bauhaus Gold), and Thrust / Brute, 2011.