Dry Pixels and Wet Molecules ⓘ

Exhibition Framing: Five Beginnings

Moving Forward from Previous Work

The subject and context for this show stemmed out of my deconstruction of the mantra, "An artist must represent the time in which they live." I had liked this statement for a long time. It made me feel responsible for doing something. The language is vague though, and its subject undecided.

I found it useful to change the words for a more philosophical approach to, "An artist must acknowledge the times of their being." The statement then becomes the content of the work. My work becomes an earnest practice to acknowledge the context of a being of the world today. Being understood both in an informal and Heideggerian sense. The subjects become any element's relationship to our perception of it. There is an emphasis on our upmost contemporary situation being contrasted with the depths of our past. Additionally I try to address my cognitive biases and a learned social context. The times are complex.

Emergence with Respect to Relative Arts Theory

Dry Pixels and Wet Molecules have emerged at a time when multi-modal, mobile, wearable forms of technology are synonymous with daily life. Roy Ascott coins the artistic output from this contemporary situation as moistmedia. I practice syncretism between these dry pixels and wet biomolecules.

Through continuous reflexivity, discourse analysis, and holistic inquiry I take on the task of intermediary, a catalyst between diverse fields of knowledge and ways of thinking. This body of work includes digital images, prints, manufactured pieces, and mixed media assemblage. I have placed emphasis on aestheticizing the conditions by which these contemporary works emerge.

Writing to a Friend

Dear friends and colleagues,

I have spent the last 18 months tracing the lines between art and nature. I believe that art should provide an opportunity to recognize our common humanity and vulnerability. I have meditated on an extensive range of aesthetics and tried to address the scope of a hyper nature of being in the world today. I think it is with a sense of irony that deeply empirical understandings of humanity's context could only have arisen alongside the hyper-simulated present. Our nature has shifted from one we evolved into one we have built. I attempt to make my images and sculptures push outwards on this simulation.

Geological Timescale

It took human beings a long time to know that they are not always the reason of things. These days we know natural history well enough to have come up with a term for the Anthropocene; the geological era wherein humanity has dominated nature. It is only within this era that Art has arisen and adapted over time as a social reaction to an increasingly complex situation. Our rich social and artistic history in the anthropic era is brief in light of things preceding human beings. It is this natural history that our physical bodies have evolved from. It is this nature we are now a part from and simulating.

When considering the greatest impact of humanity it is hard not to put emphasis on the physical impact. A life takes up a lot of space and requires a lot of particular stuff. A large species of 7 billion needs more than a planet's load of stuff.

My Goodman Statement

I Alex Fischer am neither an expert nor a political person, but a man of symbols who has something to say because I approach matters not from the distance of the specialist or the generalist, but concretely and holistically—up close, fully engaged, my own world at stake. I have only one subject, the human beings I know in their man-made scene.

Keywords and Title Candidates

Keywords: Post-Digital, A/r/tography, Anthropic, Syncretism, Mimesis, Practice, Dasein, Meta-Cognition, A Man of Symbols, A Part From Lavender, Evasive Maneuvers, Playful Exploration, Aesthetic Creativity, Morphological Analysis, Interdisciplinary Imagination, Global Connectivity, Ecological Perspective, Holistic Integration.

Title Candidates: Dry Pixels and Wet Molecules (selected), In-between Inventions, Thirty-Six Hundred Million, Apropos Creo, Concessions to Context. The Man From Earth, Creativity with Liberty, Man of Symbols, Screenshots, A Part From Lavender, Independent, Pixels and Particles: The Path to Syncretism, moistmedia, Evolution, Mimesis, In the Fog, Trapped in Aporia, Apogee, Logoi, Post-Pop-Blog, Weak Universalism, Expanded Painting, Hive Mind, Corporeality, Ontology in the apparatuses-organism age.

Rachel's Summarization: Alex Fischer's latest body of work counter-poses the primordial origins of biology against today's dominant technology-based vernacular. Ultimately suggesting that we are living in a post-digital world, Fischer exposes a tactility and precision with his imagery that in effect surpasses the daily surroundings we perceive with our own eyes and bodies.

Notes for a Contemporary Art Practice

- Learn from your precursors.
- Art is an act of discovery by investigation. Assimilate information.
- Be versatile.
- Have only one subject no matter how vague.
- Use autoethnographic methodologies. Work towards and not from concepts.
- Make marks to provide a trace of things.
- Art as aesthetic metacognition.
- Continuous reflexivity, discourse analysis, and hermeneutic inquiry never go out of style.
- Cognitive dissonance provides a natural bearing and equilibrium for inquiry. Check for cognitive biases.
- Make notes on a new nature.
- Blend.
- Go back to the world, share knowledge, develop the art of seeing and be an agent for integrative coexistence.
- The boundaries between the subject and the environment have collapsed.
- Aporia without logos.
- Instead of institutions producing subjects, we have apparatuses capturing organisms.
- Artworks can give their many precursors homes in the present, and hopefully act as temporary vehicles into some eventual post-contemporary language.
- The virtual has become more authentic than the real.
- The cloud is made of water and various chemicals. A vapour over the surface of a planet.
- The electronic culture of the global village confronts us with circumstances in which whole societies inter-communicate by a sort of macroscopic gesticulation.
- Prophetic ideas are nothing new.
- The concept of the future always just around the corner has never before held such dissidence in the public conscious.
- "Looking into" is never without "looking out from within".
- In the first sentences there were no spaces between words, in the first cities there were no streets.
- Try to have a rounded view of the past.
- 60,000 years of artistic expression as a species before reaching the renaissance 200 years ago. Art as an application of aesthetic and conceptual theories literally just went through the dark ages. Then postmodernism developed 60 years ago. The frameworks by which people make and interpret art have bloomed so recently.
- Contemporary art is lucky enough to have coincided with the information age.
- My audience is not a closed circle of artists or theorists but the public at large.
- The role of the artist is to spread themselves thin on a wide variety of subjects: sociology, psychology, urbanism and technology, education, philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics.
- To practice visual art is to practice reusing things. A dip into the pool of public consciousness.
- The slivers and shades that make up digital collages are a recycling of the simulated real.
- The idea of being holistically integrated with our tools.
- I try and practice some versatility in art production in order to show that I am not just thinking about myself.
- Discovery requires adaptation to new circumstances.
- A successful post-digital image will look good in any modern resolution, on any display or flat media. It must be plural.

Notes on Mouth

The post-digital image does not require a step backwards to view. It can be felt up close and in your face. I wanted to create a work that paralleled that feeling of aimlessly wandering around the super flat digital landscape. This piece can be viewed while standing right next to it, it accommodates the way it is being viewed, whether that be approached from across the room or shuffled up next to it at an opening.

The mouth acts as a map for the moon. The landscape is a relatively brief geological phenomenon. It is also a memory map of the way in which it was made. Segmented into screen-sized sections. Paint colours lifted from the landscape. All of the white area commonly occupied by people. The everyday human occupation is thick. We can gain new perspective on the places we live.

Principles of Paul Goodman

An artist is one who relies on the peculiar activity of authorship—blending of memory, observation, criticism, reasoning, imagination, and reconstruction—in order to treat the objects of the world concretely and centrally.

Critics may call an artist ignorant, one who spreads himself thin on a wide variety of subjects: sociology, psychology, urbanism and technology, education, literature, aesthetics, and ethics. But it is true that I do not know much, while it is false that I write about many subjects. I have only one, the human beings I know in their man-made scene. I do not observe that people are in fact subdivided in ways to be conveniently treated by the wide variety of separate disciplines. If you talk separately about their group behavior or their individual behavior, their environment or their characters, their practicality or their sensibility, you lose what you are talking about. I prefer to preserve the wholeness of my subject, the people I know, at the cost of being everywhere ignorant or amateurish. I make the choice of what used to be called a Man of Letters, one who relies on the peculiar activity of authorship—blending of memory, observation, criticism, reasoning, imagination, and reconstruction—in order to treat the objects of the world concretely and centrally.

A/r/tography and Rita L. Irwin

There is a growing literature in art education and curriculum theory that employs the qualitative research methodology autoethnography. Rita Irwin calls this autoethnographic methodology in the life of an Artist/Researcher/Teacher a/r/tography, a hybrid form of action research creating its rigor through continuous reflexivity (taking account of itself), discourse analysis, and hermeneutic inquiry (concerning interpretation).

Artists-researchers-teachers inhabit and explore the borderlands between art, science, and education, integrating knowing, doing, making through aesthetic experiences that elegantly flow between intellect, feeling, and practice to create and convey meaning. A/r/tographers search for new ways to understand realms of learning at the interface between their art making, research, and teaching through attention to memory, identity, reflection, meditation, storytelling, interpretation, and representation.

Artworks are often rendered through the methodological concepts of contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations and excess which are enacted and presented/performed when a relational aesthetic inquiry condition is envisioned as embodied understandings and exchanges between art and reference, and between and among the broadly conceived identities of artist/researcher/teacher.

To be engaged in the practice of a/r/tography means to inquire in the world through an ongoing process of art making in any art form and writing not separate or illustrative of each other but interconnected and woven through each other to create additional and/or enhanced meanings. A/r/tography is inherently about self as artist/researcher/teacher yet it is also social when groups or communities of a/r/tographers come together to engage in shared inquiries, act as critical friends, articulate an evolution of research questions, and present their collective evocative/provocative works to others.

Syncretism and Epistemology

Syncretism in the study of Linguistics describes the merging of different inflectional varieties. More generally it is an attempted amalgamation of disparate schools of thought. This not only describes an abstract concept but an effortful meta-cognitive being in the world.

The Arts reveal the epistemological and ontological circumstances of the cultures that produce them. I try and know the culture and context of my contemporaries. My aim is to make images that are in conversation with the types of images being produced today, but also involve art historical precursors and broader themes on states of being. The work's content stems from the conditions of its creation.

Realms of Learning

Fourteen realms of learning for educating artists: awesome immersion, playful exploration, aesthetic creativity, morphological analysis, interdisciplinary imagination, semiotic communication, cybersomatic interactivity, global connectivity, polycultural collaboration, ecological perspective, responsive compassion, spiritual emergence, moral courage, and holistic integration.

General Thoughts on Practice and Perception

I am thinking about getting older and the change of perspective that happens with age. We are incredibly conditioned by our preconceptions and cognitive biases. Our learned experience and mental-states are all we have. One state of mind must also now cope with the prospect of a lifetime and of certain uncertainty. The socio-political and technological futures are subject to an accelerated rate of change. The concept of the future always just around the corner has never before held such dissidence in the public conscious. The educated reactionary individual reigns today as the product of an optimized society. Are there new sweeping commonalities of human nature?

In terms of the magnitude of variety in subjective experience I can only react with meta-cognitive reasoning. HumanBeing+nature is the common trait we share, it is elusive and often thought of philosophically in abstract or isolated terms. I try to understand my own positions under the restraints of cognitive biases. It is all a matter of perspective. Our looking into something is never absent from looking out from within. My subjects are representations of contemporary meta-cognition; the act of being self-aware, of an authentic Dasein and an attempt at understanding oneself within context.

I think my own experience of the world parallels others' conception of simulation and the contemporary real. I have doubt because the interpretation of these concepts is not without being subject to biases. Who am I to think something is inherently communicable?

Art can jog the brain to show us something of ourselves. It has the ability to crack and mix together the everyday. Even when our everyday contains remarkable and unusual things those things are not often guiding contemplation. Art has the ability to do this.