Statement

20212012b

• First published Aug 5, 2021

> My work is best viewed on my website at iainball.com – this is because all media converges, collapses and remains (though subject to entropy / *theseus) — as part of a transmedia interface -

Which can then be re-created, reformatted, printed out, re-purposed and fabricated in multiple spatial dimensions before returning to the interface.

Everything is information – so Art is information; digital, analog or otherwise: Contemporary Artworks, in this regard, when emancipated from institutional and traditional constraints begin to take on the form of transmedia, networked content cloud aggregates that behave like black box’s — they get more complex the more you peer into them, acting like complex systems which are subject to greater degrees of plasticity, enabling continuous edits or entropic re-adjustments [disorganization].

I have spent years trying to understand what my work is about. I used to say that it was about alienation (iconoplasm /oxide13)– I would say that this is still the case, it’s about alienation within the incubatory architecture of advanced modernity.

This concerns an alienation which is not specific to capitalist conditions of labour, class and commodification but extends out into all aspects of the modern world, applying to socialism and communism also.

Technological, urbanised and post-industrial modernisation is doing something strange to biological systems, the planetary environment and the human condition (Symptoms). What should we do about that?

Should we let it warp and distort us?;- manipulate us, contort our self image and transform our psychology ?

It seems we have no choice.

So should we then try to exit modernism and is this even possible ? – Is there something that we should be holding onto ?… Spirituality, tradition, the radical individual imagination, the human spirit, the soul? – are these things under threat ? — My thesis is that so called ‘inhuman’ theoretical currents are actually playing into either demonic adversarialism or hive-mind collectivism, since when they seek to negate anthropocentrism, they disregard, even liquify (>, >, >) the sacred human morphology and the self, which connects us to higher states of awareness and to higher creation; because we were made in God’s likeness (Xegis, SETHIX, Æxo13).

Are we mutating as a result of technological change? What is this strange alien and biosynthetic future of cybernetic metamorphosis for which humanity seems to be facing?

Is everything that we thought we knew about our world, our reality and our history changing (2012)?

Can our interfacing with technology and hypermodernity help us to transform and accelerate our consciousness rather than domesticate and enslave us? (The Harvester Resistance / Avatar Primitivism)

My work spans design, assemblage, readymade and stolen content, sculpture and what I call Sculptural Systems such as those developed for Energy Pangea/(RES) – which are comprised of fabricated and assembled object/content-systems which interact and entangle with geopolitical and geographical regions, corporations, NGOs, fictional organisations, theoretical hyperstitions, record releases and entrepreneurs. I also work in music production (productlaneevol / communicvoid), theory, writing, digital painting and collage, installation, performance and video.

In this regard I consider myself to be working in convergent media and I’m interested in how post-conceptual and new-cybernetic practices are leading to divergent kinds of creation — this concerns artistic forms which make use of symbiotic interactions within the emerging network structures enabled by computational systems (P.C.C), both within and outside of institutions (in this sense, I do consider myself to be ‘Post-Internet’ for which I am canonised, yet remain on the fringe).

In my criticism of modernity and progressivism, for which my work is primarily concerned;– often expressing itself as a dark, occult, esoteric and mystical detournement of capitalistic, consumer, technological and modern signs, symbols, objects and apparatus (Philips 2013 / Old Earth Objects) ;– I have some hope that through a transition, transformation, transmutation, transmigration and transfiguration in how we see, decode and interpret the modern world…

That the creative desire to modulate and shift pitch, oscillation, tone and to filter and alter perspectives on how we view and interact with this strange new reality through images, objects, aggregates, content arrays and theoretical frameworks;- can play a part in co-creating a new paradigm.

This practice does not aim to represent an ironic or cynical take on modernity, as is often misinterpreted; but instead hopes to achieve and contribute to the acceleration of technomodernity and then move beyond or outside of it. To do this, one needs to infuse alternative and neurodivergent cultural, artistic, aesthetic and theoretical currents with that which is ancient, primordial, sacred, timeless and psychedelic, rather than purely nihilistic, vapid or profane — and should aim towards a trajectory which challenges the conditions of alienated labor, commodification, collective mass mind and behavioral control, the global state and post-enlightenment ‘rational’ hubris towards The New Ǝarth.

This is the light which comes from the primary source. God, Spirituality, expression — from within and outside of us, and beyond the modern system. It is the creative light..

Which we bring through darkness / (pathology loop)

20212012

Iain