Culture versus Nature, Human versus Machine
Roland Barthes: – culture versus nature: Barthes says the meaning of an image is torn between the system of culture and the system of nature.
What it means to be human: One of the first series of videos I did was those driven by the data of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN and I have similar goals in that we are trying to discover the data of life and the place of humans in the universe. My LHC artwork starts with the analysis of a small bit of CERN data and ends with a complex visual abstraction of these data.
The data were generated by a controlled collision of particles inside the LHC. These experiments “operate at the very boundaries of scientific knowledge” and produce Muons a high-energy, unstable subatomic particle. The resulting data are studied to gain a better understanding of the ordinary matter of which we, and everything we know are made. The particles created by the LHC (above) are torn between the reality of the data created and our observations and discussions of the particles based on our cultural understandings and myths of our human place in the universe. The images created by the data in my videos have a natural existence and are shaped by my own background. I attempt to show the relationships among these data and their role in shaping human existence.
Affective lens: Maryhelen Murray writes about seeing images through an “affect lens” that is an emotional response layer through which images are viewed. My emotional response to the patterns in the data are a large part of my artwork and a lens through which I build the work. As I build my own patterns on top of the actual patterns in the data, and my viewers layer their own patterns, their patterns point to their affect lenses.
My own take on the culture versus nature and human versus machine controversies is to create artwork that evokes cultural pattern making from the nature of the data that is reality and to use the machine to augment my own aesthetic. The viewers of my work bring their own cultural pattern overlays to the patterns that already exist in the data. The computer is my tool for augmenting the aesthetic of the data and patterns.