It’s the beginning of a new year and so a good moment to look for new beginnings but also the seeds already planted in previous work.
The studio is slowly unfolding now, like a crazy rainbow origami flower, revealing new and different configurations of objects, images and ideas.
I thought about adding a photo to my last post, and then stumbled upon this orange drawing I created a few years ago. And I obviously didn’t think it was bad when I made it. But it is only now that I can appreciate it. Many of my drawings are really layers of lines that pretend to have a certain simplicity of connection. (they are not) I do this to conceal how the liquids flow when they touch areas of the emerging drawing. It’s chaos. But in this one, the opposite is the case. It is the pools of connection that are quite obvious and the focus of the drawing. And it has taken me a while to truly appreciate it. Until now, I guess.
As we are entering an age in which more and more is calculated and optimised and under control of massive data, the moments of dancing with chaos should become more and more precious to us all. They will be the sting in the fatty flank of the otherwise sleek and seemingly omnipotent and self important. The chaos, the merging of liquids, substances, incomplete ideas in us, between us, between everything and us will be probably the last crumb where humanity will find a place to survive and perhaps outlive the greedy tentacles of the programmed.
And yes, a lot of this can be very well simulated. And yes, I also am writing this on a screen and it will be first displayed to you on a screen. Yes, it is being given into the hands of algorithms. And yes, I also use AI as a collaborative assistant in some of my practice.
But while it seems like machines might be the solution to so much, they are also the ones cutting us and slicing us into bits that are then sold off to the highest bidder. It’s machines among machines and algorithms among algorithms.
Yes, chaos, the opposite of that, can be merciless and deadly. But it is also at the origin of the really new and creative. Creativity itself is often quite messy and intensely chaotic.
This is not a complete thought. But perhaps that’s also something to think about.
Making complete arguments just for the sake of feeding a greedy algorithm feels creatively suicidal. Leaving room for another human to explore a path of their own, one they might need to cut with their own thoughts into the wall of …well, their own unpredictability, feels like the lines of that drawing, flowing into each other and making each other exist.
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