With this project I am exploring past relationships and how meaning or value was constructed within them. While the text is the principle device for conveying the narrative, the manipulation of the text metaphorically shifts and shuffles as the nature of my interactions with others has. This project became a space for me to freely fray and knot the threads connecting me to others. A part of my nature seems to be dichotomy, and I wanted the website to touch on that, too. Disorder and order. Restraint and excess. Profane and sacred. My personality oscillates between these extremes, and I wanted the project to reflect that juxtaposition.
The (almost) uniformity of the text creates a visual rhythm as viewers move through the site. I wanted to create motifs that appeared on multiple pages. Since I have very little control over the order in which the pages will be viewed, I wanted to establish multiple levels of relationships between the different arrangements of the text.The website is a poetic space. Normal rules of causality do not matter. Association trumps syntax. The text provides some definite starting points for digesting the narrative: there is an "I," and there is at least one other. And there was/is/was an emotional connection between those two figures. And something has transpired between these characters. Make of this what you will.
As I tested the site, I found another interesting effect: the negation of repetition. Even though there are a finite number of pages with which to interact, their complete interconnectivity allows for new relationships to be established between the pages. Visiting the same page twice does not produce the same meaning. In fact, the act of visiting the same page more than once produces a meaning of its own in this context.
Personally I was pulled to the work of Caravaggio and stochastic processes. The tensions between refined technique and chaotic activity. Obviously digital behavior conflicted with refined painting techniques. I believe that we are a transitional generation, caught between pre-digital and digital aesthetics and ethics. A better way of phrasing it might be to say that we represent the ending of humanist concerns and the inception of the post-humanist dialogue. In this way the fragmentation of body and body parts in my imagery begins to articulate the personal dislocation we experience as we continue to shift towards a digitally dominated social experience.
For inspiration I looked to Dada for its freedom of approach to text. I find the area between authorial intent and reader response to be the most interesting. Meaning in today's culture is continuously destabilized through the interactions of others. Things such as chronology and personal association cause the content of a work to veer wildly away from the intentions of the author. Is the author dead? No. The author is just now a member of a conversation. Texting, email, internet interaction - all of these have engendered the transition to author status for the masses instead of the solitary creator. We are all authors and all readers, and we all occupy these roles in collaboration. Instead of the one-way transmission of content that occurred in the form of books, comics, or magazines, we experience content as a dialogue. Information is collaborative. Meaning lies somewhere between people. So, this is my relationship with you.
Welcome.