Statement
For some long time now first analogue methods and latterly digital methods of generating moving images have challenged fine art in a very specific kind of way that every artist will have to answer for themselves. Duchamp articulated a fundamental question in art: Is it the concept or the object that is the point of art? When digital media succeeded analogue media to make moving images, the proximity of analogue materials held a connection with the object.
Originally celluloid proceeded in dental advances to then become the ‘film’ upon which a series of images could be recorded and then played back using sewing machine technology. Along came John Logie Baird and many other innovators who encoded images in an electronic form utilising analogue methods – later to be succeeded by data becoming the dominant form of recording and playback – which in itself enabled coders to then interfere with a simple flow of images – and in so doing enabled more immersive techniques.
Artists in these newer media had to often situate themselves as Ghosts in the Machine, ghosts that wandered and explored the interstices of opportunity – and for many years they could not sell their work. Now we are in a new age and we can excavate meaning from those interstices and UMA Artists can situate themselves at this threshold.
In so doing we explore the multiple meanings of technology as it interacts with art and our projects are designed to relate all of our these new innovations to the basic cause of art – where the artist selflessly throws themselves on the bonfire of exploration, to create both old and new meanings in art, such that the audience does not feel alone.
Between Object and Image
The first offering from UMA is a set of Digital Frames that take the overall title Between Object and Image where the image floats within a 7 inch lucite frame – This is a series of 12 unique digital creations of video and sound, artefacts created in each artist’s signature style using revolutionary technology – including working with AI, code-based art, as well as new media technologies developed through digital arts history again manifesting our behaviour as Ghosts in the Machine — all of this to explore the range of the human experience; producing captivating and significant media artworks.
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Pictures at an Exhibition – 12 durational artworks
In his story ‘The Mirror Maker’, Primo Levi has his protagonist fall in love and try to speak about his love through making a mirror, “the metamir” (a metaphysical mirror) which will reveal his feelings for his loved one, directly on a mirror of his feelings which he carries with him at all times. UMA artists will reveal their questions and their answers through 12 Metamirs – 12 metaphysical mirrors – 12 durational paintings – 12 abstract works – 12 intensely slow works to interrogate the nature of painting and of art itself.
Paradise Garden – Botanics of the frame
This work is a small garden of plants interspersed by 12 frames in portrait aspect ratio, with images of imaginary plants growing within the frames – the intention of this is to enforce the idea that artists add to human culture. Most of the frames will face to the front of the installation with about 5 frames facing to the back and to the sides – this being the case as the audience will be able to circle the work and see it from all sides. Initially what the audiences come upon is a waist high, 9 foot rectangle with plants within the display, interspersed by frames with imaginary plants, growing on them. The frames are self-illuminated. The soundscape will be generated by the frames themselves each carrying a part of the overall soundtrack comprised of the sound of water and soothing background elements such as wind chimes.
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12 Portals to other Worlds – A Garden of unearthly delights
In the near darkness the audience will first hear the eerie sound of wind blowing, intermingled with synthetic voices in a choral composition which evokes the sense of deep space. Turning the corner the audience then come upon a waist high 9 foot (3m) square installation – with a barren covering of dirt and rock, with 12 frames in both landscape and portrait mode, upon which images of other worlds are portrayed. The frames are self-illuminated with new forms of planetary surfaces and the audience will be free to quietly contemplate our relationship to universal themes.
The Tower of Babel – A Tower of Light
Audiences will come upon a 200cms high triangular installation – similar to a tree in shape – scattered with 12 frames with images on the frames of heightened and concentrated media forms – facing in all directions. The Tower of Babel brings the problem of contemporary social media and its effects on the citizen centrally into ‘a broadcasting tower’ of pain and unease on one level – so for a time it provides a cacophonic soundscape – and then switches into a mode of calm. These periods speed up until eventually they both occur at the same time – the metaphors of Pain and Salvation until everything stops in a darker quieter period (all of this the metaphor for the big bang and what follows universally into the heat death of the universe) until the whole 60 minute exposition that the tower represents occurs once more.
→ go to projects page