making art

I Google my old addresses to re-remember them, to see if they’ve changed, to revisit the emotions, memories, dreams that seemed possible in those moments. I paint from photos I took, photos of holidays abroad, of friends visiting, of the way light fell onto a chair in a previous dwelling (why is dwelling such a weird word?), deconstructing and reconstructing past moments. Not because I want to but because I don’t know what else to do.

The second digital 3D image I ever created was a looping video of a green gameboy, much like the one I played with as a boy. I would lie in bed and play it until my mother came in to tell me to go sleep and take it away for the night, I would get it back the next day, sometimes with drained batteries. Another recreation was a hotel room I stayed in while on holiday. Why do I keep resurrecting these revenants?

Later I attempted to recreate a lost future in the form of an office space, based off of photographs of the team that created the first Resident Evil game for the PlayStation in 1996. Driven by the promise of being a part of something that is on the cusp of becoming meaningful with all the uncertainty and doubt that comes with creating something new, but with the security of knowing what has happened. The office was filled with large CRT monitors, books, paper sheets pinned to space dividers, and filing cabinets. A low ceiling with fluorescent tube lights and wall shelves defined the room limits. I fantasised about working with the team, we would gather around a monitor to see the progress on a new part of the level, coworkers would pose with props to help animators improve character movements, the director thanked us for our work at the end of each day, I would walk to my car in the cold night, exhausted but satisfied.

I am simultaneously lured by and disgusted with this fantasy, I face a reality of “office” work daily, I am exhausted by the veneer of appearing as an open and creative space where people can do their best, meaningful work, while in reality being obsessed with satisfying board members. I am disappointed and bored by the homogenisation of products and workplace politics. But when I fantasise, why do I still dream of an office?

As a child I never gave thought to the process of making games, I assumed their existence, and my enjoyment of them, was a natural certainty. Now as an adult I cannot dream of anything other than sitting at a desk.

Mark Fisher describes a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past as “a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience”^[1] and much of contemporary cultural production as “saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past without recalling any specific historical moment”.

In some ways I find the use or mixture of anachronistic objects and styles interesting as an artistic choice rather than a forced limitation, I am able to draw upon my own personal nostalgia, but where will continuously recycling past moments lead? How many precious moments would I lose if I constantly write over their triggers, left with only impressions that this should mean something without remembering what?

Digital creations may borrow textures from the analogue to give them warmth, perhaps warmth here is a synonym for nostalgia, for example the hiss of a record player or the grain of film, to dull its sharp clarity and make it more palatable. When a digital artwork is created, unlike an analogue recording or painting which degrades over time, it exists as it is until corruption or deletion. It can be repeatedly duplicated exactly, with no distinction from the original file, there is no such thing as original. The experience of viewing a digital image or listening to a digital sound now, will be the same experience in 10 or 20 years time. The file will not degrade over time, however, the hardware we use to interact with those files will.

The screens we use will one day become obsolete and break, no longer repairable because specific parts will stop being manufactured. The computers used to interpret the arrangement of electrons into an image or sound will break or expire, the power grids that supply the necessary electricity to run those computers will eventually break down. The capacity to store or represent digital files relies on complex systems being maintained and running. These systems are likely to eventually fail, the medium of digital art is not eternal. But digital copies of analogue photos, films, songs are still produced as a way of preserving them, but how would you preserve what is digital?

In 2016 hi.co, a collection of user generated “moments”, began to microscopically ion-etch their entire website, “over 2,000,000 words and 14,000 photos”^[2], onto a single two-by-two-inch nickel plate as a way of preserving the data and bringing a clear end to the project. The plates have an expected lifespan of 10,000 years. I find the back and forth and blending between digital and analogue interesting, but the excitement caused recently by artists with strong online followings making large amounts of money selling “originals”^[3] of their digital art works, in what has been called a “milestone for digital art collecting”, comes across as an attempt to destroy a uniquely digital quality, its reproducibility, for the sake of ownership or collection. While the art work’s reproducibility does still exist, it is now sold to collectors as a peripheral to a blockchain-managed digital token^[4].

Another example of the blending of digital and analogue materials that attracted me are Angela Eames’ Nautilus drawings^[5]. Eames draws the shapes of nautilus shells, using 3D software and her computer as an extension of what she was previously capable of while making analogue drawings. The nautilus is an ancient object, having existed for about 500 million years^[6] relatively unchanged in shape, anatomy, and function, seems anachronistic, slipping through time, and now existing digitally. Eames explains, “I think it had something to do with the notion of security and endurance, a creature living out its lifetime within its space/place, contained in a shell”^[7]. While we face extinction^[8] it feels reassuring to be reminded of our position “of self in relation to time”, beings that have existed since long before humanity, are still swimming in these oceans.

Others are visiting for just a short while. ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first”, is the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. ‘Oumuamua is “shaped like nothing we’ve ever seen in our own solar system neighbourhood”, being 400 meters long, highly-elongated, and exhibiting non-gravitational acceleration, which led to suggestions that it “might in fact be alien technology”^[9]. ‘Oumuamua may have been wandering through the Milky Way for hundreds of millions of years before passing us by and I wonder about where it has been and where it plans to go still. There is an internal pressure to justify my occupation of physical space with whatever reason I can grasp at and I have extended that to the work I create, as though that was a requirement for me to continue living, to continue creating, as though it would reduce the shame I feel, as though anyone was asking. And I wonder, does ‘Oumuamua feel that same anxiety?

In the field across from where we lived the grass grew long and hid a stream somewhere and along its edges the weavers would build their nests, hanging from the tops of the reeds. I loved finding them, wishing I would be able to spot chicks, but I mostly remember them being broken and torn and no longer in use. Spending the days there exploring and making up games while my mother slept. Our house was a dark red face brick with strips of grass surrounding it. I would throw my green power ranger toy, with its flipping head transformation, up into the air and try to catch it again as it fell until once it fell onto the roof and became stuck. Some time later it was eventually blown off and I found it again hidden in the grass but the plastic had been exposed to the sun for too long and was faded and yellowed. We used to play roller hockey in the street and ride our bikes up and down and there was a section of sand that I loved to ride through because of the tracks that were left in it by my wheels, but I can’t remember my friends’ names. I would walk to the store that used to sell reject broken chocolate pieces in big clear plastic bags for cheap and buy a big bag for my mother and I. Sometimes we would drive to the corner shop and buy a loaf of just baked bread and eat it, sitting in the car together.

I Google my old addresses to re-remember them, to see if they’ve changed, forgetting the emotions, memories, dreams that seemed possible in those moments.