Sisyphean Pursuit: Paper, Pixel, Unity of Being

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2011-02-16

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Abstract

Our lives seem to have grown increasingly dualistic in nature: Physical experience takes place alongside and often secondary to digital interaction. Modern platforms delivering instantaneous visual and audio communication have made the distinction between the two states all the more ambiguous. Whether or not such mergence of being renders an existence closer to or further from essential truth is debatable. Futurists tout the evolution to be a step closer to a liberated utopian world, while the technophobic condemn the proliferation as a falling of humanity into enslavement by tools. I am critical of such absolutist thought and challenge those views with the assertion that we are in the same state as ever we have always deluded ourselves with imagery and the only change over time has been the degree of sophistication by which we achieve this. Such delusion exists out of the human necessity to communicate in the physical that which hails from the inner realms of being. Paper in itself serves as an anecdote for this argument, as the advent of the printing press more than half-millennia ago created a situation analogous to the information overload of our own time The paradoxical role of paper, both as tactile fiber and container of expression, is the primary vehicle through which I am exploring this liminal state. My objective is to convey through paper the indeterminacy of experience when we attempt to assign a hierarchy of authenticity to our world through visual perception. Paper s evolution from plant fiber to abstract manifestation and back again to bodily association, reflects our continuous balancing act with the world as we live with and create from it. Techniques may change with time, but the condition of a liminal existence remains constant. Our need to dwell in both requires that there be at least an apparent reconciliation between the physical and metaphysical, not unlike the transcendence between holding a sheet of paper and the experience of the content it presents. When paper seems too mortal and limiting we turn to infinite and theoretical data bytes, and when those grow foreign we again seek the physicality of paper. Like an undulating wave, we are ever-shifting between states, and it is in that sinusoidal form where we continue to exist wholly as skin, paper and pixel.

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Keywords

Art, Philosophy, Technology, Digital, Paper, Tactile, Graphics

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