What follows is a very long post. Please feel free to comment. This is meant to be an open dialogue, and not just me spilling my guts out onto some blockchain.
Growing up, I never thought that I'd study Art for so much of my life. I was always into computers, English, technology; and video games. If I could make a career combining all those things, it would be perfect for me.
It turns out that in grade nine, at high school, I wrote in my journal that I wanted to be a video game reviewer. Some encouraging comments from my English teacher at the time were all I needed. It convinced me that I could do it, so I wrote reviews in that very journal.
Art wasn't on my mind at this point of my life. I liked story telling, and all the mediums in which it can take place within. I immediately recognised video games as a way of doing this. It was a medium that resonated with me, and one I wanted to explore further and in more depth than sensible.
I cannot remember a time when I didn't enjoy writing down the storm of voices in my head. There is catharsis in getting information out of my mind and into a medium. Doing so on the HIVE blockchain is an integral part of my self identity at this point of my life.
Above is a taste of the momentous cavalcades of words that you're about to witness. It'll be a story of my creative life, along with some musing on the future of Art.
Throughout my education, I had so much exposure to the tools of digital art. It started with what is likely my first memory of using a computer. Apart from my time spent with Lemmings , there were other bits of software on the school computers. One of those, and an application that many people my age may have experienced, was Kid Pix.
I made animations of sparkling city lights, in poor quality 2D, as a bitmap. I don't know what resolution these images were, but to me, it looked as though it could be a level from any video game. To me, that was magic.
Computer studies didn't stray too far away from creativity. I continued to use software to do things they weren't intended for. I used an application called Hypercard a PowerPoint-like piece of software to make a "choose your own adventure" game. Feedback from my teacher was positive. I became frustrated by the limitations of the software. I wanted to be able to do more.
I had a "creative diet" that centred on the primary subject matter of video games. Augmented by science fiction and fantasy novels, my imagination was beset by constant stimuli. Between things like Heroes of Might and Magic, untold, unremembered novels, and the depths of a Pentium computer, my ambition flourished.
I don't remember creating many things that were "art" in this stage of my life, until I got into the high school part of my education.
The next major piece of "digital art" making stuff I had exposure to, that I remember; was something called Bryce. This software enabled you to create fractal terrain. Once you'd created the terrain, you could render breathtaking scenes in 3D. They took far, far too long to render on the Pentium1 era machines that were at my school, but it was a breathtaking way to explore computer graphics.
Along the way, I learned Photoshop, and even dabbled in Computer Aided Design in "Tech Studies". "Tech Studies" is Australian for "make things out of wood, metal, and other substances". I always enjoyed, seeing things come to life on a computer screen, but making them in the real world didn't seem to have the same impact on me. I much preferred the task of creating a blue print, of "what could be", rather than "what is".
My mind is constantly speculative, and is always thinking too many steps ahead for its own good. Being able to recognise the weakness of this mindset prevents me from making progress on the here and now, which is rather frustrating.
Art didn't really take off for me until my 9th year of schooling, the same time I wrote in my English journal that I wanted to review video games. By that point, I also had the notion of wanting to create video games. My artistic practice though, didn't follow in this avenue beyond rudimentary 3D modelling and Photoshop work.
My true "historical record" of me as a creator begins three years later when I was in my final year of high school. I still have reams of digital files detailing my processes. I'll get to them. My primary mediums were digital, but I had enormous sketchbooks and portfolios of poorly rendered concepts; which are now no longer in existence.
Here are a few examples of things that I did - it was all about documenting the process, just as it was about "show your method" in mathematics.
Here I rambled about cropping, and curves, all the way back in my last year of high school, just to do a street portrait in a black and white style...
And another, for something that happened to be my final piece of work for my Year 12 Art Studies class. Look at those super old Windows XP taskbars, and 4:3 aspect ratios, and old, old Photoshop versions! How times have changed! :D
When I left high school, after creating a prolific folio of photo manipulation, painting, and other artefacts; I had a summer-time job lined up to fill the gap between the end of high school and the commencement of university. That job was working for a local youth art group, called Carclew, based in North Adelaide. Each year, through its City Sites program, Carclew employed young artists to create public art works for local government briefs.
I went in, folio in hand and was lucky to land my first "Real" job a few weeks later. I included this work, which was part of my 2005 folio of work in highschool, a painted triptych, of mixed media on canvas, because I was not allowed to use the computer for every piece of Art.
With regards to the above triptych, as I write this, it is probably the first time in several years that I've actually seen the work. I don't know what happened to do, but I suspected I destroyed or disposed of the work in a move. My mother didn't approve of this lingering around the house all that much. Perhaps I was an angsty teenager...
After formally graduating high school, I was told two great pieces of news for my burgeoning artistic career:
- My work would be exhibited in The Light Gallery, featured alongside the best examples of High School Art due to its hefty and enormous supporting material, and then
- The Teacher's registration board wanted to "borrow" my work and feature it in their offices for a year - so my work would be exhibited for a lengthy period of time.
This was that very image:
One of my final art pieces produced in High School; Photoshop
My work for Carclew resulted in meeting someone who was due to start the very same Undergraduate Degree at University into which I was enrolled, and this was a relief. We worked together on some banners, some murals, in exhausting, oppressive heat. It was a legitimate sweat shop, particularly if you know about Australian summers, and unairconditioned upstairs warehouses.
One of the many banner concepts:
And the work environment itself, replete with the murals we were working on at the time:
This job was of course, a contract, and only lasted for a scant few weeks, before I became a full time student of the Visual Arts. It was strange to go from studying many different topics to having a curriculum filled with the same topic, and investigating that subject in exhaustive detail, from different perspectives, and in different periods of time.
I will never forgot the culture shock I had in my first Art History lecture, where the lecturer may have been speaking another language. I didn't understand much, but I learned quickly. To my confusion, many of the students in the first practical / discussion class about Art history didn't even know how to write an essay!
I spent many years writing essays, researching, wondering if I had made any mistakes, and furthermore, wondering if I had indeed made a mistake by placing myself down the pathway of "I'm going to be an ARTIST", and not get one of those real world jobs.
Throughout my time at university, I continued to play video games, and I was lucky enough to become employed in the field. My second "real job" was to be a Community Manager for a game known as "World in Conflict" for the Australia / New Zealand region. I answered forum posts, handled Media Releases, and helped with game / server set up, while also liaising with the developers of the game.
It was a wonderful exposure to video game publishing, and it made me want to know more and more about how to get a job in the field. It felt like I was very close to "Writing reviews of video games", when I got a gig writing a few guides. So, I ended up writing those guides, then getting poached by a video game review site that was run by a local ISP. That video game review site is now defunt, and lost to the archives of the web, but you can probably find them on the Internet archive if you look up the Internode games network and reviews by "holo`" - that was me!
I was doing this at the same time as studying Art full time at university, and often, my worlds collided. I found myself writing reviews or news articles while actively being in a lecture, and my laptop was an absolute mess of two sides of my life that really shouldn't have blended together. I had achieved my dream, and I was questioning why I continued to study a curriculum that I firmly believed wouldn't take me (and wasn't resourced) to provide me with the chops to become a "video game artist".
I felt despondent, crushed, and terrible.
I was very stressed, and I spent the first semester break of my first year at University in hospital, with Crohn's Disease like symptoms, all the while, still wanting to pursue video games as an art form. I eventually recovered, but I needed to slow things down.
I'd write many essays in my time at University about this very subject, and even cheekily referenced my own articles in my own essays. I couldn't shake the feeling that I didn't belong in Art School. I was too technical, too rebellious and frustrated by the institution not being at the forefront of the "real" digital art that was out there, computer generated work, fantastic renders, and was upset by its focus on installation art using digital elements like projections or video.
Nonetheless, I persevered, unsatisfied, unhappy, stressed, unhealthy and ironically, a sponge for all of the books in the University's library. I read so much about Art, Philosophy, and other matters, that I felt as though it wasn't about the "experience of doing an Art degree", but the very experience of scholarship - how to do original research, come to my own conclusions, and document these in a manner that was meaningful.
Then, one day, I was at home, doing an essay, and the phone rang. It was an aunt from my Father's side of the family. I hadn't associated with any of them for a very long time, and at 19 years of age, my father had been absent from the family home for a period of 5 years. He had moved interstate, started a new life, but was in touch on a fairly regular basis.
He was 49, I was 19. He was dead. I was alive.
My father's death from that very moment played a pivotal part in the influence and focus of my Art practice. While I still wanted to produce something that told a story, and that had a strong narrative, I was constantly pre-occupied with the ephemera and fragility of life. My work took on darker subtext, more meaning, and while I wasn't all that close with my biological father, there was an absence. Now, as a 35 year old man, I wonder what he would make of the world, and of the place I've carved out within it for myself.
My work started to focus on the very fear of my own life being wrenched from me. Still recovering from my stint in hospital, and on a pretty dramatic and uncomfortable cocktail of medications, I shifted from melancholy to anger with the frequency of a metronome.
I started to read Roland Barthes, and focused (pun intended) on photographs as a medium of representation of what was and what is no longer. There's a single photograph I have of myself and my father, from an Easter trip that we took to another state. I think it is the last photograph of us together from before he died.
Yes, it is a photograph of a photograph. Deal with it. Without going into turbo-mode Roland Barthes. "He is already dead and he is going to die." That applies to both of the subjects in the image. If you have not read "Camera Lucida" by Roland Barthes, and you consider yourself a photographer, go and read it.
This meandering tale of dealing with death came to light in my Masters year of university. I started to focus on the notions of time, moments, and the ephemerality of human life. I created works that helped me contend with how mortality was represented in Art, beyond that of documentary style paintings depicting heroic deaths in battles, or like one of my favourite paintings, The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David.
My master's thesis was titled "Visions of Death". It accompanied a body of work, of which the main piece was the video work, "lingering", depicted below:
My thesis abstract was wide-ranging in its focus:
Representations of death in visual culture are plentiful. This thesis is concerned with decay, sleep and monuments, which can be seen as symbolic or visual objects that have associations with death. An investigation into the work of John Everett Millais and Linda Bergkvist's use of the natural world to refer to the transience and fragility of human life will be conducted.
The notion that sleep is a state that resembles death will also be examined by discussing several post-mortem photographs and Susan Sontag’s statement that all photographs are momento mori. Other pieces of art work which portray the dead as though sleeping will also be discussed.
An examination of monuments, gravestones, and the cemetery as a site that offers the prospect of immortality will also take place. This will focus on the reproduction of the Angel of Grief, investigating how monuments, much like human flesh, erode and decay, albeit at a much slower rate. Finally, an examination of contemporary practice that refers to death will focus on the 2009 film After.Life and the work of prominent video artist Bill Viola.
With appealing chapter titles such as "Declaration" (that's some humour to break up this lengthy text), each chapter was an essay on various topics.
You can read the chapter "Sleep As Death" online. It's been on this blockchain for over five years. Wow.
The chapter "Denied Eternity: Memorials and Monuments" was previously published on this very blockchain, before it forked to become HIVE.
The completion of this thesis left me feeling rather empty. I wasn not artistically or intellectually satisfied. I felt as though I had wasted five years in the pursuit of academia to be awarded a sheet of paper, a transcript, and a large bill. What I had gained, however, was insight. I had gained an artist's resume full of exhibitions, which I added to most recently last year, after a long hiatus in exhibiting work.
While I have a Masters Degree in Art, and am probably not seen to be a practicing Artist by those in the real Art World, with galleries, and agents, and commissions, and all that structure, I have been, in the last few years, the most prolific photographer I have ever been.
My deepest and most cherished friendships and conversations are with those that cherish and love art, and embrace the expansion of Art and expression in all its forms. In the time I've taken to prepare this post, I've been through two decades of practice, without really showing my practice.
If you want to find that, here's a collection. I also won some awards for my photographic work:
The practice doesn't matter as much as the journey does. Sure, I've produced meaningful pieces of work, and plan to create many more, but those who are concerned about things like AI destroying Art are missing the point. Art is simply a means to express your viewpoint in a Visual manner.
Those visuals are deeply personal and at once problematic, for the person creating them may not have constant, precise focus, or lack the ability to articulate visually their conception.
The preface here is that with a tool like Mid Journey, which I've been playing with considerably over the past few days, we have a point where Art can become truly democratised. We are entering a bright new era where anyone will be able to competently and potently bring their visions to life in a medium that was previously locked away behind years of formative study and meticulous practice.
My bookshelves are heavy with books about Art, and my mind is full of concepts, context, and history. Those histories and concepts will always be able to come to life, and with the future around each and every corner, drawing us closer to death with each heart beat, being able to express ourselves as individuals is the most important thing we can ever do.
Perhaps it it selfish, but my Art will be propelled into this void, and I hope that it stirs thought in somebody.
If you made it to the end, thank you. You are truly cherished. Rest assured that my urge to create Art eats away at me with an unrelenting hunger. It is time for me to answer to that hunger and create.
From me to the Hive blockchain, I am yours for as long as I may draw breath
