PAINTING

paint

pixel

atom

brush

chaos

meme

digital

photon

quanta

0 and 1

virtual

At the dawn of the Age of Electricty the world came to be understood as being made of atoms comprised of particles of energy. Light for the Impressionists' had little to do with the form building technique of painting light and shadow to reveal the three dimensional properties of space. Instead their textured layers of marks, and gesture strokes reveal more about atmosphere conditions, the fleeting moment of light and a particulate understanding of human expressive communication.

Seeing a world that is particulate requires contemplating the relationships among many variables that many describe the post-modern condition that we live in.  Our daily experiences involve participation with people and  things  that are visible, invisible, virtual, electronic across a global network.

How does media effect mass communication?  The evidence of such experiences can readily be found in popular hype-media and in the objectives its makers: News, TV, the Internet, entertainment, art, music, science, literature and cultural transmit media in highly controlled and manipulated electronic packets that bare very little resemblance to the e neat rows of text you are now reading but carry an electronic message that reaches millions. This mass-communication reaches a world wide web of listeners and responders whose only experience with cyber beings my be solely electronic. E-mails are translated into zeros and ones that are then converted into pulses of electric energy. Electronic particles carry communication data with images and ideas of pleasure and pain. A high school student in Montreal obsesses on web site featuring gory details of Columbine High School massacre and then decides to be a copycat assassin at his own high school. Plato warned us of the power of imagery, because someone might believe in an image which in fact could be a lie. The power of media to communication truth and lies equally was cause for concern. The French philosophy Baudrilliard describes another possible outcome of media as being an "ecstasy of communication" that is fulfilled in the pleasure of information for itself. The pleasure of learning and finding things out lies in the process.

What then is the nature of creative process in the Particulate Age? Remember, the computer is just another instrument, like paint, it portrays, relays and conveys ideas and experience. The way of thinking in the virtual age is open to multiple connections that challenge fixed methods. This is not about choosing one mode or another, but sensing connections among modes of knowingThis is then, not a philosophy for painting but more a method for perceiving life.  The evidence of this work   would be in how many points of view are found in the thinking behind the media.