People Are Like Storms

            Wow.  So it's been a year and a half since I last posted anything.  The reason for that is that the blog was ugly and I hated it.  I finally managed to figure how to redesign it so that it's somewhat more appealing to look at.  So now I can start catching you up on stuff.  First off, I was in a group art show of Nick employees in august of 2012 called Off Screen.  The idea for the show was that in our department, we make art for the screen, and rarely get to make anything physical, so this was our chance to make something physical and see it in a space other than on a TV.

            My submission was a piece I called People Are Like Storms. I was set on doing something sculptural, and after cycling through different ideas, the one that stuck with me was doing something with voxels (Voxels being three-dimensional pixels). My main thing with pixels and voxels is that conceptually, they tie in with an idea I had about the nature of beings and matter and information, and the relationship of the three. Take the idea of a storm: we name storms, as if they were a constant entity, and indeed, satellite footage shows us a mass of air and clouds that has a distinct shape seemingly moving as one across a map. But the reality is is that the air molecules are constantly being taken into the storm and then ejected, so it's more like a wave of energy that passes through the air, where energy is transferred from molecule to molecule. Pixels are a similar phenomenon - the illusion of a colored shape moving across the screen is not actual movement, it's the Gestalt effect of information being transferred from pixel to pixel. And now, I've come to realize that people are the same way: We eat, our cells are replenished and then die, only to be expelled by our bodies and replaced by new cells. It's said that every 7 years, every one of our cells will have died and been replaced by a new one. So we can't even rightly say that the essence of our being is DNA molecules and proteins, because those same molecules pass through us like so much air in a storm. So what is this essence that gives our bodies shape and our memories consistence? It's information. We are ultimately, essentially, made of information, and the matter that makes us up is only a constantly changing expression of it. It's not necessarily a one-way relationship, as the properties of our matter also, in turn, contribute to forming our identities.

            So to express this idea, I wanted to take a subject or subjects and "voxelize" them, to give the sense of something passing through a matrix, distorted and imperfect to our visual scale, but still intact and somewhat recognizable. The subjects I chose are characters from my book that I'm working on - the last couple shows I was in also featured material from my book, and it's just an attempt to continue building on this universe I'm trying to create, so its only existence isn't only within the pages of this book. I constructed them out of individually painted and assembled foam cubes, and installed them so they were suspended in midair with fishing line.  I also have the album on G+, complete with commentary.