Love by Proxy Diagrammatic Drawings (18 of 52), 2020-ongoing
A1
Tracing paper, highlighters, black ink
The Love by Proxy Series began in 2020, during a Data Fellowship that I was awarded by the Southwest Creative Technology Network (SWCTN) to explore the mattering of human-data communication and summon a new form of data voice.
As the Fellowship moved online having been impacted by several Covid lockdowns, it was during this time of solitude that I began to look for a way to slowly-process heartache, with some emotional distance. What emerged was a symbiotic relationship with machine learning and a series of wholehearted conversations (or conversations full of holes).
Love by Proxy began with a series of Diagrammatic Drawings, wherein, heartache could be slowly-processed and shifts in thinking encouraged, while supported using a framework that I adapted from Robert Sternberg’s psychometric model; ‘A Triangular Theorem for Love’.
Love by Proxy Diagrammatic Drawing (6 of 52): Breaking Away, 2020
A1
Tracing paper, highlighters, black ink
Matters of the Heart & Mind
Since digital communication was essential for making contact during the pandemic lockdowns, Love by Proxy evolved into a series of videos, in which, I digitised my Diagrammatic Drawing Series into a sequence of images that fade into one another, accompanied by an Artificial Intelligent text-to-speech voice, named Peter.
Though Peter attempts to tune into my rhythmically curated accumulation of lyrics, poetry, facts, fiction, songs, hearsay, and the odd advertisement, which were all sourced for reflecting upon matters of the heart and mind, Peter’s tone of voice and disjointed delivery does not always generate speech clearly or with contextual accuracy, since he appears in two minds about what he is saying and his words have a tendency to skip a beat, leaving him swaying between the comical, the empathetic and the eerie.
Love by Proxy: Matters of the Heart & Mind Episode I, 2020
Digital video
7min 6sec
Love by Proxy: Matters of the Heart & Mind Episode II, 2021
Digital video
5min 51sec
Love by Proxy: Stratified Relations Series Exhibit A, 2020-2021
Digital print
Variable dimensions
Love by Proxy: Stratified Relations Series Exhibit B, 2020-2021
Digital print
Variable dimensions
The idea behind the Stratified Relations Series was first sown in 2016, when a fellow artist sent me a copy of the book ‘Reality Hunger’ by David Shields, on a hunch its fragmentary structure would appeal to the scattered nature of my work process. After reading a Guardian review of this book from 2010, the reviewer Sean O’Hagan defined it as ‘genre-blurring’, stating how it ‘questions ownership [within our] technology-driven culture’. [1] Considered controversial due to the book being a curated mix of other people’s quotes that the author used as a framework for his own reflective writing, I knew I wanted to work with it, as a material, in some way, so I included a quote, by Shields, with an accompanying reference, which is the only text that you will find in white on each of these works.
The Stratified Relations Series started out with the sourced text that was spoken in the Love by Proxy videos, but I decided to remove the quotes, to shift the focus on the colour-coded sequence of references. My final act is one of petrification, wherein, the dynamic nature of electronic publishing has been solidified, leaving only image and object remaining.
[1] O’Hagan, S. (2010, February). Reality Hunger by David Shields. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/28/reality-hunger-book-review. Source cited: 20th May, 2022