MEANING |
IS IT ART OR MANUFACTURING?
In Pop Art, artists scale up manufactured objects (like a telephone or a tin of soup) in order to make a statement about materialism and consumerism. This is turned upside down by using manufacturing to scale up an art object, to make a statement about spirituality.
The computer head is figurative on the outside but abstract on the inside (seen through the translucent material). The surface is made of tiny triangles, showing how the figurative is made of tiny abstract parts - just as we are made of molecules and mathematical DNA. Mentally we understand how the figurative is made of the abstract but physically we only see the figurative.
The winged figure symbolises the turning point from faith in technology to one that includes spirituality.
The figure transcends the animal duality of the ox and the lion, via the wings, to reach towards a human mystical consciousness.
The figure is like Icarus (who in Greek myth flew too close to the sun making his man-made wings melt) it is trying to hold a concept of God that is too large for it to grasp intellectually. It must be humble before it can progress spirituality.
The use of the technology in the sculpture for enlarging seeks individual mastery of nature but this use of technology is not the only one. Technology can be used in a natural, reproductive, communal way. These other uses of computers in art (2D, 3D real, virual and installations) are explored in the artist's website www.Theism.co.uk.
For more details of the Artist's symbolism see the Millennium Exhibition,
www.Theism.co.uk
Design and Artists
HOMEPAGE
Computer Sculpture and the Spiritual
Abstract process relates to the Mystical and figurative product relates to the Moral. These perspectives cannot be linked philosophically, but joining the art forms physically makes this link.
