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Hollywood movies and religious Baroque painting are certainly both authoritative mediums. The viewer looks up, in a sort of trance, watching stories unfold in a reality, which looks similar to our own, but somehow bigger, more coherent, compelling and attractive. This turns the viewer into an emotionally impotent and vulnerable spectator, perfectly susceptible to suggestion […]
“The Jon Monaghan Chessboard” - laser cut acrylic, ebony, chrome bolts
Just moved into my newer, better studio at the University of Maryland. Here is how I fixed it up:
before:
after:
Matthew Barney’s well funded, five part, career-making film series the Cremaster cycle is a visually extravagant cinematic experience. These films grew out of a mainly performance based body of work, and in a way can still be seen as that, because they are certainly not typical narratives. The cremaster is a name for a […]
“Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.” Michael Arlen, Some Notes on Television Criticism, The View from Highway One, p. 9.
I do not […]
Johanna Drucker’s “Sweet Dreams” deals a refreshing discourse on contemporary art by supporting a theory of artists’ active participation, or complicity, in the all encompassing environment of commercial culture. She cites the Canadian media “ecologist” Marshall McLuhan often throughout her book and not surprisingly so, as his writings and are indelible to the theory she […]
The Digital Stone Exhibition, sponsored by Autodesk, is a large traveling exhibition composed primary of 20 large granite sculptures, created initially in 3d software, then hand carved in China.
I worked directly with the artists Ken Snelson, and Jon Isherwood to create their pieces in digital space. I also helped print all the pieces with rapid […]
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Digital man now exists in a moving, pervasive, un-centralized sphere of information, sound and images. As this sphere get increasingly omnipresent, its effects become less apparent. The 20th century Canadian “media ecologist” Marshall Mcluhan provided us with a set of concepts that can help us understand our position in the digital age through an […]
The simple act of throwing a ball at a target is an incredible accomplishment of calculating force, wind speed, weight of the ball, distance, angle of release, thrust, spin and so on, but these are not precise measurements, they are an accurate visual estimation of abstract information. Machines that can hit targets need numerous calibrated […]