About 2 years ago I was asked to participate in an exhibition about the alphabet - where each artist was assigned an individual letter, I was assigned the letter L... I thought about the notion of loops and as I usual I ended up thinking about infinity and regression and the idea of constant concentric circles moving outwards and inwards leading back to the same thing though slightly regressed each time - inwards or outwards is usually hard to distinguish, so much that negative and positive almost bore little difference. The exhibition never actually happened and all traces of it's future vanished. The below video is what I put together to be exhibited and due to the disappearance of this exhibition this is actually the first time it's been seen... a small fragment of it at least (though you'll likely be able to guess the ending):
I think it must have been the non existence of this exhibition/screening that led me away from creating painstakingly jerky abstract animation - that and the fact that I was getting annoyed with my computer crashing from filling it with too many video clips interspersed and collaged with tinier and bigger video clips - also I realised whilst pausing any of my animations at any point that I had created thousands - if not more - compositions that could be used and exploited in later work (all my animations are better when you press the pause button and they stop moving, talking or doing whatever it is each one does). Tonnes of patterns and textures from these animations could be cannibalised into new work if only I printed each frame out one by one - and then through the use of a photocopier, a pair of scissors and lots of glue sticks I could produce randomised black and white collaged artwork at a very face pace - and then use the collages to collage into each other again and again and see where this leads too. In effect this is actually a project spanning about ten years - from when I did my early paintings and collages that were turned into cut and paste animations to my animations being turned into cut and paste collages and eventually a large scale installation - it's all very much a potentially infinite project that could get denser but also larger over the years if I continue at it... going jerkily along a path of constant permutation with a background philosophy and fascination with void, infinity and forever dead cells regurgitating themselves into living cells like when a black hole singularity explodes at the other side into other universes. Or lungs breathing out and in until crushed into dead dust which gets breathed in and out by lungs - some kind of constant recycled forever. Which brings me to another animation I made called "Line Line Line Line Line Line Line - - -- -" which was meant to be added onto forever and ever and ever into a long neverending thread of forever and ever. I got as far as about 30 seconds - here it is:
There comes a point - in the consideration of infinity - where ones patience begins to run out entirely and one realises that infinity cannot be created or even fully imagined - and I've started to think more about the idea of the finite - of finding something limited and whether anything truly limited can conceptually exist in a world of never ending interconnectedness. Is it possible that I'm looking for something finite within my work and that I should instead of looking into void space I should be hopping off my concentric conveyor belt and looking at the central steering wheel and get everything into some kind of perfect balance - then the inconceiveable distance may come into sharp focus and all these people, objects and concepts surrounding me may actually just become a wall of blank nothing on all sides. Or perhaps not. Anyway here's another video just to put in there because I can - last animation I made around the same time I was getting back on the photocopier - it actually almost conveys some kind of near - infinite photocopying existence - one which I seem to have ended up living in:
With any luck the price of photocopying will increase beyond what I can afford and I'll be propelled out of the machine like it was a sneezing whale - or I may just die at some point, that's what happens to most things living. Is the point of death finite but the void of the hereafter a constant grind of static meaningless stuff? Does that meaningless stuff eventually coagulate into a puddle of interconnectedly chaotic logic - like the life we are living now? The imagination of nothing manifesting itself into something and everything. Oh no! That sounds like another thought about infinity on it's way - where's that steering wheel? Evasive action or battle stations?
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