|
|
"Flow"
(developed for CyberFest '95)
acrylic with video
electronics, computer, sound flux.
(three independent cube modules + computer module)
12" x 12" x "38"
DISCUSSION:
What is the relation between human beings, nature, and technology? That
is the question. As we look into that question, what do we see: at the
end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the 21st , we see
that we have gotten deeply involved with our own artifacts, to the point
where we are not humans looking at what technology can do, but technologized
humans (Prozac reaching into our brains), looking at ourselves and feeling
lost within an arbitrary, self-created world, with no guideposts other
than socially transmitted memes. Culture and technology are organic
outgrowths of ourselves as organisms, like the carapace of a snail,
yet this outgrowth - which is created by our brains through thinking
- this artifactual and symbolic cocoon has become the mental and physical
shell that we live inside, looking out on nature. It has become our
encompassing reality, feeding back on itself through our thoughts, media,
and urban constructions, becoming the arbiter of our view of reality,
rather than what we learn and perceive via feedback with the natural
world (as "primitive" man must have done). This is a very unusual and
dangerous situation, unknown in evolution. On an ecological level, because
our living has become so indirect, the feedback we need about the long-term
consequences of our actions does not reach us fast enough, if at all.
On a psychological and spiritual level, we have come to rely on pre-processed
thinking and artificially created and disseminated information. Individual
and ecological sanity are linked. What is the "cure" for this mental
and situational malaise? It is not in "returning to nature"
or becoming Luddites, but in recapturing a natural state of mind, and
re-growing a healthy relationship to nature and technology via that
equilibrium, from the inside-out. It is by re-connecting within. The
state of flow is the mental state we were born with, but lose upon learning
pre-processed thought forms that are useful, but over-relied upon. The
solar-electric powered video sculpture "Flow" is the union of electronics
with moving images from nature, of water and moon and clouds in their
natural rhythms, and electrons and images flowing across monitors within
a plastic, "unnatural" encasing. Yet it is transparent — not hidden,
but still mysterious, like nature, like the ultimate nature of the human
mind.
|
