I entered the virtual space as an object maker, recognizing Sketch Up as a sculptor might recognize a chisel as it is in the context of a great hunk of marble challenging him to carve out of it some thing greater, if not beaconing a worth while pursuit of time. The virtual space confronted my notion of material, my tactile self in knowing and understanding my self as a person who processes life and the world through expressions of the hand. Physical material slowed me down, gave me time to contemplate my emotions, stresses, and intellectual curiosities. Virtual space and the material it is composed of, was shockingly immediate; it was altogether uncomfortable. I persisted though, and spent a vast amount of time there, adapting by producing many digital things. Indeed, I spent more time in that universe of virtual material, than I did in my initial world of physical material wrought with all its resistances. Only the intermittent realms of dreams interrupted my waking hours in this new virtual space, which probably only exacerbated my temporal confusion.
Still, and once again as it is a truism in my life, this new virtual environment needed processing, and after a days journey through virtual space, I still had to process my findings physically. I continued to make with my hands in my medium of choice since very early childhood, clay. The great amorphous philosophers stone if there ever was one, again only adding to the chasms and endless tunnels of my elastic mind. It appeared for a long time that every thing I once relied upon to keep sane was only compounding my sinking into the fortuitous and proverbial rabbit hole. Working in clay, which was once a stronghold in my psyche was now equally queer as the virtual worlds I was inhabiting by day as well as the dreams I was having during sleep. Nothing made sense anymore, and yet I persisted as the good student I was and as I only know how to do, on masochistic levels, hopelessly addicted to the nothingness.
One day, while crafting some new digital object, free from the confining notions of entropy and gravity, I had what addicts can an epiphany. The digital material I was working with created both form as well as space. In physical reality, on earth, we have air as space, only defined by the ground and the objects protruding from it or resting on it, in what ever substances they may be occurring in, of natural materials or human made ones. In virtual space there is no preexisting air. All that is seen on the computer screen is code, ones and zeros. In order to define the simulacra of digital things, all must be programmed. This premonition gave way to my understanding of context as it is defined and in relationship to form, in a very formal way. As an object maker, my idea of physical context has always been taken for granted, except perhaps when considering the display of said object or sculpture.
It has been a while since I have visited the virtual space of Sketch Up, about two years. Sure, I may dabble here and there, but I am grounded once again in the physical, it seems more important to me. But I am still left with questions. For instance, if it takes physical knowledge to create virtual spaces, for both visiting and creating, then can the opposite be true? Can the virtual influence the physical? What is happening now, in my head and in my studio is, I am making things by hand as they have been influenced by virtual means and experiences. I am using tools such as Push/Pull and Rotate from Sketch Up in my mind in order to create physical objects in clay. My studio is now more than a sum of equipment, it is in my mind as well as my hands now.
I am still an object maker, but these new objects are strange as if created by a foreign self who I’m still getting to know. Considering clays origins, the buried earth, in conjunction with the context / form relationship in Sketch Up, that of each thing being created of the same coded material, blurring the lines of distinction and distinction-ability, I feel my self finding common treads in the land and the landscape. Both made of small things like rocks and trees, and at the same time vastly expansive as far as the eye can see and the feet are willing to traverse. As infinite as a virtual plane and also composed of the same unifying material. In a way, my current practice has come full circle, the last major intellectual journey having taken during my undergraduate studies, where I returned processed clay of various mixed powders to the earth to do with it what it may through a series of different weather and climate conditions. Accepting the larger and uncontrollable forces as they come; what ever the outcome may be, clay can adapt.
The objects have become contexts or fragments or ideas of contexts, which is a very odd thing to think about, distinguishing intention from interpretation. But, that is how I felt during my virtual journeys, each foot in two different worlds at the same time, not alive and not quite dead. In the physical world, I felt as if I was just going through the motions, a sort of muscle memory reaction to life and the things going on around me. Like knowing where the light switches are in the dark but not using them because I knew they now longer worked. In the virtual realm, every moment was wrought with tense short bursts of excitement that never amounted to any one memorable experience of pleasure, a steady drip of morphine, one drop at a time just sustaining me until the next, always under the guise that the next click will be the click of something great. But nothing there amounted to anything, or I should say any actual object. How does a sculptor conceive of this?
These feeling of loss of self and detachment have began another line of work that is intertwined with the loss of making by hand. When working with digital material, it seems odd, almost futile to go back into the clay studio and get dirty. The medium, as all physical materials do, has its limitations, quite unlike virtual material. Furthermore, and from another perspective, I thought a long time about excess. I would ask myself questions that challenged my making beyond mere compulsory habits. Such as, do I really need to make another ceramic cup? For that matter, with the ease of digital technology at our fingertips, three-dimensional printers, and factories, do I really need to make by hand, a coffee mug? Won’t it become yet another coffee mug to add to the heaps at Goodwill later? Does yet another coffee mug need to be made at all, by anyone? Some would say yes, as a defiant gesture of the hand made. As an act which defines humans from all other things, in meaning, imagination, and identity. For those qualities of humans, I agree, they are vastly important to uphold and have daily reminders of, but the time of designed trinkets are over. They, in the context of virtual communication and connections, like morphine drips themselves, are outmoded. If you believe other wise, stay in the Shire.
My point here is that for my own practice, making by hand, and all the functions those objects hold themselves to answer, is being replaced by virtual things. At times I feel very sad by this and at other times it makes the most sense logically and I think it may actually help our overly commercial and materialistic society. But at what cost, is always the opposing thought in my head. It is in my nature to flip-flop over issues and this subject matter will not change that fact about me. As our lives become more and more entangled with virtual experiences, my feelings of the loss of human identity, as making physically has sustained and formed our minds since our beginning, has also become a major theme in my practice. This feeling is nothing new when seen in reaction to new growing technologies, just look at all the hoopla over industrialization. Our current neo-craft movement is nothing more than a reaction to virtual technology, just as folks were reacting to machines making objects instead of us and our all import souls. Both reactions are about loosing touch with the ways of life and how we as humans have always understood it, by manipulating the earths material with our hands. Life is a processing of natural materials, or I should say it was.
So what we have here is death on an exponentially rising incline. Not the death of humans per ‘se, instead a very old and identifiable human identity. The pinch pot holds more information in our being than it does the liquid it was mean to contain. Now we cast is away. The new world is untouchable, not worth fixing, and quickly replaceable.
As per usual, I have about two or three main bodies of working going at all times, usually each contradicting the other, or each merely presenting the two sides of the same coin, as if coins naturally stood on their edges, as a sculpture would be seen on all sides at all times. The last few paragraphs explaining the loss of human identity is the first. The other body of work is about fantastic new perceptions of what is possible, embracing the qualities of virtual spaces and digital materials, accepting their influences by finding similarities between them and the unseeable and expansive preexisting earth. It is a hybrid living that is mature, simple and constant. I feel this understanding is broad in scope, which reassures me. This series calms me and gives solid weight and grounding to me and I feel that it is moving beyond my initial hang ups and gut reactions to digital technologies, alas it must be made though.
