Love by Proxy Diagrammatic Drawing Series (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.
Building a framework of support that I adapted from Robert Sternberg’s psychometric model: A Triangular Theorem for Love, Love by Proxy began as a series of diagrammatic drawings, in which I slowly-processed heartache over time, to allow for shifts in thinking to take place, so that the discord of past passions and desires could be sublimated and recomposed.
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, the diagrammatic drawings evolved into a series of videos.
Digitising my drawing series into a sequence of images that fade into one another, I then accompanied them with an Artificial Intelligent text-to-speech voice, named Peter. What emerged was a symbiotic relationship with machine learning, resulting in a series of wholehearted conversations (or conversations full of holes).
Though Peter attempts to tune into a rhythmically curated accumulation of lyrics, poetry, facts, fiction, songs, hearsay, and the odd advertisement; all sourced while 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.
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 it 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 the above works.
The Stratified Relations Series started out with the quotes that I sourced which were spoken in the Love by Proxy videos, which I later decided to remove, 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