Love by Proxy: Matters of the Heart & Mind
A4
Tracing paper, highlighters, black ink
Love by Proxy Diagrammatic Drawings (18 of 52), 2020-ongoing
A1
Tracing paper, highlighters, black ink
The ‘Love by Proxy Diagrammatic Drawing Series’ began in 2020, during a Data Fellowship that I was awarded by the Southwest Creative Technology Network (SWCTN).
As the Fellowship moved online, following several pandemic lockdowns, it was during this time of solitude when I began to look for a way to process heartache, with some emotional distance. Adapting Robert Sternberg’s psychometric model; ‘A Triangular Theorem for Love’, and using spreadsheets and an algorithmic process, as frameworks, in which to support matters of the heart and shifts in thinking, this ongoing series explores the symbiotic relationship between human and machine.
Love by Proxy Diagrammatic Drawing (6 of 52): Breaking Away, 2020
Materials: Tracing paper, highlighters, black ink
Dimensions: A1
The ‘Love by Proxy Episodes’ are a series of videos which evolved during the pandemic lockdowns, when digital communication was essential for making contact. Whilst digitising the drawing series, to share them online with other SWCTN Data Fellows during the pandemic lockdowns, it was while reading ‘Vibrant Matter, 2010’, by Jane Bennett, when I began to consider the digital glow of the screen as having agency which could affect human thinking.
In the ‘Love by Proxy Episode Series’ (below) the focus changes from viewing my diagrammatic drawing series side by side, to a digitised sequence of images that fade into one another, which are accompanied with 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 all reflect upon matters of the heart and mind, his 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.
Matters of the Heart & Mind Episode I, 2020
Material: Digital video
Duration: 7min 6sec
Matters of the Heart & Mind Episode II: Labour of Love, 2021
Material: Digital video
Duration: 5min 51sec
Stratified Relations Series Exhibit A, 2020-2021
Material: Digital print
Dimensions: variable
Stratified Relations Series Exhibit B, 2020-2021
Material: Digital print
Dimensions: variable
The ‘Stratified Relations Series’ (above) began in 2021. I imagine this series to be ongoing until I am not around to make them anymore, since working with sourced text, wherein, timelines are disordered in favour of rhythmically arranged quotations formed through word associations and malapropisms is a process that lends itself to unlimited potential.
The idea behind these artworks 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.
Deciding to remove my collection of quotes from these works, to use them in spoken form in the ‘Love by Proxy Episodes’, the focus shifts to 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.
We Are Only Partly Real (Night Cycle, Zone 1 & 2), 2025
Above is an installation shot taken from the virtual reality exhibition ‘We Are Only Partly Real, 2025’, in conversation with the artist Steve Dutton, commissioned by Spike Island in partnership with Stephen Gray, and funded by the University of Bristol’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Award.
‘Flex, 2017′ became part of the ‘Love by Proxy Series, 2020-ongoing’ after discovering the top and bottom edges of the light filled frames had the same shape as that used in the ‘Diagrammatic Drawing Series’.
‘We Are Only Partly Real, 2025’ is a VR exhibition with a day and a night cycle, where night becomes a version of the exhibition with a dream-like state. In the night cycle shot (above), ‘Flex, 2017′ channels the florescent sequence of colours from the ‘Love by Proxy Series’ and becomes an object of reference, in which to consider colour as a perspective rather than a property of a thing.
[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
[2] Vaughan, H. Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p5-22
[3] Sontag, S. Styles of Radical Will., London: Secker & Warburg, 1969, p1-34