Artist Statement August 2011

Clay as a physical substance persists in sustaining our material consciousness, even within the context of a clean, user-friendly, and technologically based digital age.  I find this dichotomous circumstance very intriguing.  The amorphous possibilities of clay continue to be influenced by the ambiguous context which we call virtual reality.  Outdated, yet analogous to the infinite possibilities of digital form, the plastic quality of clay serves as a relatable and familiar construct for affirming an adaptive hybrid psychology between physical and virtual realities.  I am interested in how digital material will continue to influence our notion of physical form in reciprocal and possibly reactionary manners. My work continues to explore these influences and possibilities in form and concept, reconsidering the notion of function within the hand-made discipline of ceramics. 

From Clay to Code

I am confused why we are not discussing what I consider a most pressing issue.  (Forgive me if I am being redundant.)  That issue being, that the very nature of things is changing right before our eyes and continues to do so exponentially.  Things, physical things, are increasingly changing from tangible objects to non-objects, furthermore, they are existing in a context that has fairly new and unprecedented conditions.  Non-the-less, these non-objects are serving the needs of people, of which are information, entertainment, and communication albeit in very different ways from which we are conditioned to.  I am, of course, talking about the digital world, or virtual reality - by extension, that which we call the Internet.  An intangible reality which we created and exist in that is not conditioned to how we have come to know and sustain ourselves by, meaning, physically, through a material consciousness - with psychologically structured knowledge based on the notion of resistance to material.  The very nature of things, a concept that has a foundation in natural material knowledge, said another way, traditional craft materials and practices, has no connection what-so-ever to the virtual world because that reality, if it is indeed so, is not physically based.  As a non-material, non-form, non-space, non-time, non-anything we can actually sense with a haptic experience based reality, the virtual environment is re-forming our very psychologies, social interactions, and ways of understanding.  The very foundation of humanity is transitioning right before our eyes from a material based consciousness to a digital material based consciousness. I am alarmed because crafts people who are intrinsically connected to this material foundation are not talking about it.  We are literally losing touch with our humanity.  Could this circumstance be the impetus to the resurgence in craft? Furthermore, if this circumstance is as critical as I suggest, does this new digital based psychology not reformat the very notion of aesthetics, nullifying the distinctions between the individual disciplines of art, craft, and design or in the very least, completely expand their previous definitions? I suggest that those who continue to practice making by hand will become the utmost revolutionary but not by continuing to objectify necessity or intention, but rather by reconciling in an adaptive manner the non-material qualities of traditional craft material, those qualities being likened to the amorphous and the metamorphic.

Accretions - New Ceramic Work, July 2011

Some Kind’a Function - New window display downtown Portland

Clay as a technology persists in sustaining our material consciousness, even within the context a digital age.  Outdated, yet analogous to the infinite possibilities of digital form, clay serves as a relatable and familiar construct for affirming a hybrid psychology between physical and virtual realities.

Window display downtown Portland until mid-August 2011.  At the Galleria, 10th and Morrison SE.

An Absolute Survey of Unthinkable Complexity, 2011 - video documentation.

Pics from my thesis ceramic show

MFA - Jason Lee Starin - Opening Reception May 19th, Thursday, 6pm - 9pm

An Absolute Survey of Unthinkable Complexity

A suspended moment is presented which asks the viewer to locate themselves simultaneously in physical, digital, and virtual space - offering varied representations of the same form, made manifest as well as illusory, to act as re-orientation points within a hybrid consciousness. 

Jason Lee Starin

MFA Applied Craft & Design Graduate Off-Site Practicum Installation

Opening Reception May 19th, Thursday, 6pm - 9pm

524 SE Ash. Portland, OR. 97214

An Absolute Survey of Unthinkable Complexity

My practicum project asks the viewer to locate themselves simultaneously in physical, digital, and virtual space.  The viewer enters a room containing wooden columns that stand on the floor, a digital projector which projects images of similar-looking columns on one wall, and mirrors that face each other on parallel walls.  The mirrors create the illusion that all of these elements are one and the same: the physical columns, the digital images of the columns, and the virtual images of columns in the mirror.  

This experience offers varied representations of the same form, made manifest as well as illusory, to act as orientation points within our consciousness.  How will people adapt mentally to the continuing loss of the physical object, a growing cultural tendency?  From the viewpoint of a craftsman, I ask how craft thinking will adapt as a creative discipline to this new phenomenon.  I suggest that it will continue to help us locate ourselves in space, in other words to continue to define our identities, as it has done in the past.  The non-material qualities of the craft object, alluding to the craft process, will be called upon to help sustain our continued survival.

My perspective is that of a maker, or more appropriately producer, as it suggests making within a consciousness that has been developed from these two realities.  Form, which was previously dependent on physical laws and limitations, has gained a new perspective.  As digital technologies have done away with the barriers of physical properties, new sensibilities will develop through their continued use.  Once the potentials and limitations of digital material have been made conscious through use, we will then see how their properties impact the physical, in a reciprocal and influential manner.   

My opposition is that the illusion of sameness falsely sustains our expectations of how digital technology ought to be received. It also creates assumptions of controllability when perceived solely on a tactile basis.  I ask the viewer to relinquish their desire to comprehend this space by purely physical or virtual means, and accept the current situation in a new way: as a suspended moment of which to consider new hybrid definitions of space, form, and more importantly, self.  This multi-sensorial experience is a bodily one, which includes the eyes, the hand, as well as the brain.  As Mark B.N. Hanson  states, “... the absolute survey can be said to exemplify the task of art as process in the information age: to frame information in order to produce new images and, we must now add, new forms and spaces as well.” 

Jason Lee Starin

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