Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Subscribe to socio
Subscribe to socio
<100 subscribers
<100 subscribers
Opposite Equals Advance contemplates the contradictions inherent in the quest for digital life extension. The collage includes the binary digits, and features the quotation: “Unlike analog data, which typically suffers some loss of quality each time it is copied or transmitted, digital data can, in theory, be propagated indefinitely.”
Informatizing the biobody promises aspirants a means of transcending analog mortality. Yet digitization is always seductive. Real and obvious gains coexist with more obscure losses–of all that is not readily quantified, measured, captured, recorded in standardized format, and maintained. The history of modernity is chockablock with such seductions, where apparent power is gained at the under-considered cost of the difficult-to-quantize.
Opposite Equals Advance combines images of the artist’s own wounded hand with those of a subterranean stairway, egress from the basement of a former box factory. Imagery of staircases feature prominently in the artist’s work, symbolically embodying both human aspirations to elevation and the tensions and inequalities inherent to that quest.
Pairing wounded digits with high modern linearities, the collage contemplates the paradox of the digitized biobody, which both achieves damage immunity and inflicts self-harm. Many strive towards the ultimate breakthrough innovation: to achieve escape velocity from analog mortality. Yet in so doing, we recapitulate patterns so ancient and familiar their enduring mythologies suffuse everyday language: Icarus complex, Faustian bargain, Achilles heel, Pyrrhic victory.
Opposite Equals Advance takes its title from section three of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which reads, in part: “Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.”
Opposite Equals Advance contemplates the contradictions inherent in the quest for digital life extension. The collage includes the binary digits, and features the quotation: “Unlike analog data, which typically suffers some loss of quality each time it is copied or transmitted, digital data can, in theory, be propagated indefinitely.”
Informatizing the biobody promises aspirants a means of transcending analog mortality. Yet digitization is always seductive. Real and obvious gains coexist with more obscure losses–of all that is not readily quantified, measured, captured, recorded in standardized format, and maintained. The history of modernity is chockablock with such seductions, where apparent power is gained at the under-considered cost of the difficult-to-quantize.
Opposite Equals Advance combines images of the artist’s own wounded hand with those of a subterranean stairway, egress from the basement of a former box factory. Imagery of staircases feature prominently in the artist’s work, symbolically embodying both human aspirations to elevation and the tensions and inequalities inherent to that quest.
Pairing wounded digits with high modern linearities, the collage contemplates the paradox of the digitized biobody, which both achieves damage immunity and inflicts self-harm. Many strive towards the ultimate breakthrough innovation: to achieve escape velocity from analog mortality. Yet in so doing, we recapitulate patterns so ancient and familiar their enduring mythologies suffuse everyday language: Icarus complex, Faustian bargain, Achilles heel, Pyrrhic victory.
Opposite Equals Advance takes its title from section three of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which reads, in part: “Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.”
No activity yet