During this semester of my MFA I have been borrowing from a theory of evolution to frame my art practice: the interplay of transmission, variation, and selection out of which emerges “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful” as Darwin put it at the close of On the Original of Species. The latest significant transmissions, both to me and from me, include:
- bookmaking skills
- the inspiring installation work of artist Laura Heit (Two Ways Down) shared with me by visiting artist Erik Ruin,
- selling a small mixed media work in the recent Out of Order show (yay!), and
- the inclusion of my artist book, redeemed, in an MFA show at MAP.
While I had been thinking of transmissions from me as examples of “protecting the investment,” protection contains a strong element of selection when I decide which investments to protect. The above-mentioned artist book incorporates scrap aluminum cans and tracing paper made 50 years ago. These are raw materials that, collectively, we have invested resources to extract/fabricate on a large scale. The principle of re-use is emerging as foundational in my practice.
Variation is the aspect of these intertwined evolutionary dynamics that comes most readily to me (almost to the detriment of the emergence of a stable order). Most recently I have ventured into new territory with lighting. In addition to microcontrollers programmed using arduino, I now have ESP32 wifi programmable micro-controllers driving some of the lighting, opening up a more flexible modularity for the color dynamics. This builds on the existing modularity of the neopixel assemblages that project, as well as what they project through (items casting shadows, reflecting, magnifying), and what they project on with the introduction of backlit structures.
A century after Darwin published his ideas on biological adaptation, the science of complexity emerged to illuminate the ways that simple rules and self-organizing hierarchies of modules are at the core of emergence, that is, when something is more than the sum of its parts. Rather than focusing on the thing that I wish to create – the whole – my practice is to play with the parts, allowing my internal and collaborative selective pressures of surprise, delight, and even frustration to lead the way towards the whole.