The Art Fish : Antony Gormley

Watched a really good documentary the night before on this artist and wanted to write a few things down about it for my own memory's sake. I find his work very compelling and the film quite inspiring as it spans a lifetimes' exploration on the idea of how a body and a body's sentience occupies a space. Gormley has in his latest works, moved into an abstraction of this interpretation from the figurative object; to the figurative translated into a space that makes the occupier the object.

The documentary brought up some really great quotables that have stuck in my mind with regards to context of work and how one informs the other. A segment (≈ 37:30) sees Gormley installing a new work on Lundy island for the Landmark Trust, where he says quite poignantly

" This bit of headlands has been here hundreds of thousands of years and now it's got a foreign object on it..."
" It's got to have that sense of it being, in a way, an irritation - but then at the same time , it's got to own its place" 

and most notably :

"... The test of a well sited work is, during the time that it's there you can't think of the place without the object or the object without the place"

The world of SL is on one level a sculptural landscape in which everything that exists within its "space" is hewn from the mathematics of 1's and 0's and yet its physicality is only "felt" in a visual way. For me, this is where the idea of how this visual space may in theory be ported into tactile reality via printing, is an intriguing and worthy notation for further exploration.

What is virtual also sits in that uncomfortable space of ephemerality. I think as humans we take comfort in constants and mark making that it is hard to grapple with the transient. In this, the world of words, images and digitized information is the strange frontier; yet how human is it to still be asking the same questions today that still echo those questions asked before...

New Scientist (What is reality)

Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)

The Art Fish : On clones, mechanoids and the premise of Art.

Embryonic 1

It's funny to myself, how a change in ones own mindset can result in a burst of creativity or inspiration. I suppose it should have been obvious to myself really; given my main occupation is about branding and rebranding for the matter. Anyway I digress...

One of the new things I'd like to blog more about is my own personal explorations in using virtual media to create valid art. Over on my flickr I mentioned a little about how intrigued I am by the idea of identity and the homogenic. This also spills  over to wider ideas that swim around the central theme of intellectual copyright and original thought. (Yes bear with me - my mind makes those sorts of connections!) I'm likely to blab about that now and again too!

So this series echoes a lot of varied ideas.
Creatively - it went something like this :

D thinks .o(Hmmm I wonder what embryonic dolls dream of...)

Later that day...
This idea of android dreams are something of a penchant and based in part on my recollections of things I used to dream up in childhood. The mecha-doll fish also has some reference to my fondness for Michael Manning's Hydrophidian

Embryonic-2 : Mecha Amonite I

Embryonic-3 : Mecha Amonite II

Embryonic-4 : Mecha Kraken

Embryonic-4a : Mecha-Amonites in Tank

I thought it would be nice to share some personal techniques in the form of a PSD formatted file which you are free to use, remix and redistribute (non commercially). I created the glass marble sphere in Embryonic 2 from a number of hand drawn layers and composites which I am placing here for you to play with. Have fun and don't forget to let me know if you found it useful.

<3 The Dita fish.

Loosing my marbles. PSD

Original PSD for free use