| GHOSTS |
| Athens 2007 Sculpture for scanner and c-print Ghosts is a series of diptychs. Each consists of a mixed media painting and its attendant c-print enlargement. The work is the sculptural feeling generated by the viewer as he touches the paper work, trying to discover the unseen areas charted for his sake by the scanning process. |
| A ghost discovers what the gaze hides. 9 Diptychs The diptychs are twins. Each pair includes a painting (mixed media on paper), and its attendant c-print enlargement, after scanning to maximum and printing on plastic canvas. The work is the sculptural feeling generated by the viewer as he touches the paper work, trying to discover the unseen areas charted for his sake by the scanning process. Paper and plastic are symbols of the stand off between tangible and digital reality. The viewer, you, is (as always) the unknown factor in between. Simultaneously announcements of a forthcoming life, a postscript of the current one, and macabre caricatures of legacy, ghosts appear in interzones of meaning. According to tradition, ghosts wander between life and death, always demanding revenge or just disturbing and scaring us, the living. Their glory consists of confusing history with memories. Sometimes, beyond merely exciting the imagination, ghosts lead people to swear they have witnessed them or even that they can speak in the name of them. |
| People have failed, until now, to prove their existence. But this discourages no one, least of all ghosts. They continue to exist, and now, they have acquired, as everyone else, a digital dimension. The ghost in the machine is an ancient belief. Disobedient labs, chance discoveries, inexplicable technological advancements, even tragedies are attributed to a “technical problem”. Why is it a problem? If it is, what is the solution? Are we in a position to judge the unexpected decisions of machines? Maybe we are only stomping our feet, like angry children, while machines prove exactly as disappointing and beguiling as indifferent mothers. It’s time to study the metaphysics of machines. If the mystical bothers you, then call the “ghost in the machine” an energy that we haven’t yet learned to harness completely. In the last centuries we have welcomed electricity, nuclear energy, the subconscious. After science, it’s the turn of art to go forward where nobody imagined before – where the ghost in the machine comes from. |
| Each work is a diptych. On paper is me, my tracks. On plastic, simultaneously everyday and eternal, like marble, lies printed what the scanner saw while translating my work across the actual/digital divide. The shapes and landscapes that emerge on the printout remain invisible on the paper that the machine scanned for your benefit. In our own tangible reality you can only feel what the machine so clearly sees, only by passing your fingertips across the paper, just like the blind read Braille. On the printed plastic, the machine child, these mechanical discoveries can be admired embalmed, glossy and untouchable, like a line on the forehead of a Pharaoh. Egyptians believed that Pharaohs were gods and that their death was ascension to the heavens whence they came from. Are machines a temple, and if so, who are the gods we worship there? We offer them all our reality. They say we are blind, and simultaneously opens our eyes to their view. Are we ready for this apocalypse? |