What Can’t Be Seen, Must Be Shown, pt. 2

The title of this post was inspired by my work as an artist in Second Life, and the thinking behind what it actually means to exhibit or show art in virtual space, resulting in the project blogged here [AVAIR] and seen here [Ars Virtua]. The text was recently written in response to a journalist’s question concerning the role of emergence in my work:

In the 1966 film by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, « Blowup », a murder gradually unfolds, the evidence revealed by an unwitting photographer who happened to be shooting pictures in the park where and when someone was assassinated. Through the combined, multilayered, crisscrossing processes of dialogue, movement and art, the killer and the dead body materialize from within a multitude of stimuli and background noise, of sex, rock’n roll, fashion and drugs, from within a series of enlarged photographs, whose hidden objects and forms emerge to signal the truth. An artist’s intuition, intelligence and technology combine to find the answer from within the spaces that were otherwise empty.

From Michelangelo Antonioni’s fim, Red Desert [found @ DVDBeaver]

Emergence in art is the alignment of the artist’s instincts and tools, put to the service of revealing meaning from the material substance of his or her discipline.

Color-fields for the painter, form-symbols of light and space for the sculptor, blocks of image-movement for the film maker and patterns of force and resistance –tension, compression, movement, from within a field of continuous space physics, for the builder in virtual environments.

The process of creative development, «conceptualization <-> representation» is one that necessarily engages emergence as an agent of revelation and discovery. Creation is a messy patchwork, a reversible process where ideas emerge through material experimentation to reveal their force and to project their form. Proceeding through a chain of creation –from thought, to sensation, to incorporation, the realization of a project depends on both intuitive inertia, and on meticulous, methodological evaluation and examination of what the intuitive process has brought forth. The continuation of the creative process is the actualization of the project’s force.

BTW, I using an image from Antonioni’s 1964 film « The Red Desert » instead of from « Blow Up » was neither an oversite nor symbolic, but an appropriate representation of this post’s meaning: emergence & revelation. The obvious phallic symbology found within the image was revealed not through watching the film at 24 images/second, but rather, by searching for that meaning within images taken out of context, using screen capture.