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“The position of the artist is to ask questions, not reply them.”
– Anton Chekhov
“I’m not making an attempt to clarify something or present solutions; as a substitute, I need to go away viewers with extra questions.”
– Brendan Dawes
In Brendan Dawes’ Collisions #1, we see one thing like a half-dismantled Jedi spacecraft overwhelmed by outgrowths of Muppet-like fungus. One other, Collisions #5, is likely to be the orgiastic gathering of the few remaining specimens of an undiscovered species of jellyfish. Collisions #3 is likely to be a Lilliputian steampunk airship constructed on the inflated corpse of a pufferfish.
Regardless of being an artist who works with code and knowledge, Brendan Dawes is just not serious about actuality. One of many core befuddlements that kickstarted his Collisions sequence was the head-scratching frustration of why artists and designers utilizing AI, VR, and AR have been merely creating snazzier variations of the world as we all know it. In his phrases:
“It nonetheless baffles me that in digital worlds, why the staircases? The promise of digital actuality is a lot extra than simply replicating what already exists.”
Utilizing code, Dawes actually collided imagery gleaned from “the pre-existent” of our world (as he refers to it in his artist assertion) together with micro organism and lichen in addition to man-made expertise to create manifestations of “the never-was,” a name to arms for artists working within the age of AI to make use of the total energy of their imaginations and create the world anew whereas not shedding contact with the pure world that sustains us.
As expertise makes it a behavior to utterly disrupt our lifestyle each 5 years or so — like some new, extra highly effective presidential time period — Collisions is an artist’s embrace of the longer term, one which doesn’t see expertise as the reply to an issue, however makes use of it to ask the larger questions of how we’d begin over time and again. We all know disruption is coming, so why merely repeat what got here earlier than?
Once we fail to query the oppressive constructions that drive our progress, we turn out to be complicit in arming these constructions with higher weapons. Social media was dreamt up with starry-eyed intentions of bringing the world collectively, however the capitalism that fuels the locomotive additionally lays the tracks. To combine a metaphor, seeding anger and sowing division reap bountiful returns.
The distinctive capacity of people to think about units us aside from animal and machine minds, and empathy — the power to think about what it’s prefer to be one other individual — is the last word artistic act. Expertise’s pernicious superpower to divide works in direct contradiction to those human intuitions and insights.
As we enter into one more cycle of tech-driven upheaval, Collisions is a plea to carry quick to our uniquely human talents to dream and to like.
Let’s not dream up a world during which we proceed tithing to the coffers of expertise lest we be “left behind” — a favourite tagline of the techno-utopians. As an alternative, let’s neglect division; let’s permit disparate parts to collide and create one thing new, one thing unimaginable, one thing created by empathetic people working collectively to create one thing new and higher.
Although expertise may appear to have an energetic creativeness, solely we people can collide in a means that’s swish, stunning, and therapeutic.
Watch Brendan Dawes focus on Collisions with MakersPlace’s Content material & Curation Supervisor Brady Walker:
Watch or hearken to our full 1-hour interview with Brendan or try our Information to Knowledge Artwork.
Hero picture: Collisions #4 by Brendan Dawes
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