something about artists as censors

Wait a.. Whut? Two things yes I have managed to get back here with ina week and that head line. Artists as Censors. Well let me explain. This is where my head has been at since I seem to be on the other side of the whole fun depression/anxiety fest I was having.

Artists are censors. (Watch out for incoming science that I will probably get wrong.) Our experience of the world is really odd when you sit and think about it. Using all of our senses we soak up oceans of information. We process around 34 GIGABYTES of information a day through our social media usage and general informational noise. In a 2 hour face to face conversation we will pretty much equal our daily media diet.  Recent research suggests we can absorb 2.5 petabytes of data.  Here's the thing though. We don't use all this information. Our brain and consciousness (what ever that is) filter the information. So at any one time we are receiving just the information we need to complete a task ( or as our brains were programmed to do survive)
 

This iswhere my brain starts to boil. Oh i get the general drift of the science, but the intricacies seem to branch off into philosophy and questions about the very fabric and nature of reality very quickly. And if you know me you'll know I love those rabbit holes too much. 

So we can accept that the brain filters out 'non essential' information to allow us to function. This means or strongly suggests that my experience of the world is due to a set of filters different to your set of filters. But why artists as censors. As artists and indeed any one working in any creative field, or anyone trying to communicate to some one else, wechannel our ideas, sculpt them to fit the window we wish to show the world. To do this it is necessary to act as a censor. To actively filter out the information that distracts from or clutters our ideas.

As artists we censor our view of reality to construct a new view point that will have to work it's way through the filters of relevance in the minds of our audience.

That brings me on to my thoughts about meaning and semantics. But I'll leave those as thoughts and ideas unfiltered for you consumption, brewing in my little hairy Irish noggin.
 

Stay safe, take risks and watch out for stray syntax.

Afterword(s)
If my very genralised reading of the science here is questionable please let me know and fill me in. Either with a stern talking to, or by providing some friendly and easily digestiblelinks, preferably audio, (not video, I'm usually in the cave painting or looking after kids or just relaxing with the Milky one, so video does not get watched) Geez I'm demanding. Podcasts are ace!
 

Something over due

I'm well past an update on what I've been doing recently. My work is falling into what I consider to be 3 distinct areas :

1. Glitched work.

This involves using multiple exposures, apps on my phone like Decim8, Audacity and Photoshop.

The work produced is mainly photographic, and tries to give a sense of a memory of a space moved though and seen from many angles, whilst revealing the 'coded' nature of these memories.

Landlocked and Sunblinded

If this needs clarifying ask me what the hell I'm on about.

2. Self portraiture.  Due to a lot of factors, the main one I work out of my garage and don't leave there unless the kids are bleeding or hungry.  The net result is I see me a lot and hang out too much in my head. With the portraits I'm trying to express the emotions and mind states I'm feeling. The works feel self referential to me. Me expressing my mind state in paint to me.

Pattern Recognition

3. Text based work. I'm loath to call the work typographical as that implies the art of letter design. My work with the text is about flows of consciousness and word play. In the main each word really references and springboards off the previous. I create syntactically correct phrases, where the semantics break down past the word level. The inspiration comes from the 'myth of the book' and from Paul Klee's 'Open Book'.

Pox 167.

These various strands overlap, and currently I'm trying to find a way to link them together in a way that is both visually and conceptually pleasing to me.

Something about being absent.

It seems the harder I try to be more regular in touching base here the longer the time I spend not on here. Anyways back later. Ironically.

Something about the plastic and the digital

I've been really absent from here recently, but it's not like I haven't been busy. My new series is coming along great.  It's a lot of long hours.  Today for example I've spent 5 hours working on one image, glitching it (choosing the right glitches, corrupting the image too much and compiling the images into a gif in PS ) and pushing my old laptop well past it's processing power.

My efforts are rewarded with QR code below.

This is stage three in my master plan. Follow the QR code to see stage two. Stage four isHERE.

Stage 5 is yet to be completed.

I'm out of the studio for the next week or so. As a result my work will mainly be digital and code based.