My studio research is split between engaging in digitized encounters/indexing my online activity and honing my skills as a craftsperson. I see these two practices as necessary and parallel. My visual research stems from anxieties about the world as it is mediated through digital platforms I engage with. I generate content using digital media in a variety of ways. I pair transcribed language from videos posted online, with images from the forty years worth of family photos I’ve been tasked with archiving and preserving. I contend regularly with my own naturally expanding image databases by editing, organizing, and zig zagging between content made just for me and content created for the pleasure of others. I catalogue my thoughts with an ever-present device and self-consciously curate them. Sometimes I share them with others, usually I fantasize about sharing them with others but ultimately decide not to. This practice is simultaneously art making and an insane coping mechanism, influenced by both the compulsion to create and consume cultural products and an earnest desire to generate relevant conceptual content.
Far from those digital impulses, making my own paper and the physical sensations associated with handmade paper, allow for the viewer and myself to be grounded in a tactile experience. Engaging with paper requires a temporal shift from fast paced digital production and consumption toward a slower process of making and viewing. Making paper by hand elongates my artistic process adding time for editing and refining ideas while my hands are busy with the business of making. The book structures I employ obstruct information as a way of slowing the viewer to facilitate discovery, you have to move each page to see the next. This action is familiar enough to be approachable but is becoming increasingly alien. This reminds us of our past, the sensations and associations of engaging information through analogue media, and we begin to consider what value physical engagement with media has for us today. What do we gain from information being shared at the speed of thought, and what is the cost?
Far from those digital impulses, making my own paper and the physical sensations associated with handmade paper, allow for the viewer and myself to be grounded in a tactile experience. Engaging with paper requires a temporal shift from fast paced digital production and consumption toward a slower process of making and viewing. Making paper by hand elongates my artistic process adding time for editing and refining ideas while my hands are busy with the business of making. The book structures I employ obstruct information as a way of slowing the viewer to facilitate discovery, you have to move each page to see the next. This action is familiar enough to be approachable but is becoming increasingly alien. This reminds us of our past, the sensations and associations of engaging information through analogue media, and we begin to consider what value physical engagement with media has for us today. What do we gain from information being shared at the speed of thought, and what is the cost?