The Garden of the Forking Paths: outline.

Goal

By exploring the medium of the (digitally animated nonlinear, and possibly multiscreen) video essay – using text, sound, and image – a semi-fictional narrative is constructed that aims to bring the artist, contemporary art, and the viewer closer to the origins of image-making in human evolution. 

Philosophy

Convergent and branching lines of human (visual) development clearly show every culture is based into the same roots: imagination. 

Questions & issues

How do I, as an artist working mainly with digital means, get as close as possible to those roots? Also: working in the fields of ‘deep time’ and ‘big history’, relying heavily on physical remnants, how do I prevent the destruction or disappearance of my digital/video work in the deeper scope of time? Do I need to have some sort of ‘offline’ or ‘off the grid’ version of my work? What would that look like? Can (digital) animation be translated into a future archaeological find? 

Crossover between disciplines

The research makes use of the fields of archaeology, evolutionary biology, neurology and psychology, cultural anthropology, and art history, including architecture and cinema, and literature. 

My research proposal departs from the assumption prehistoric painted caves are multimedia installations, the cave providing a natural architecture. The paintings are not merely paintings, but an integral part of the space, its lighting, and its acoustics (4). Certain caves were scripted (5), ritual spaces, designed as portals, and perhaps as a representation of mental space. The caves are models for later Neolithic architecture: dolmen often mimicking caves, temples, churches, cathedrals, and even, in some ways, the controlled environment of the modernist contemporary art space.

In this respect the human ability to produce vast amounts of fiction, using image to materialize these dreams or hallucinations (6), is an astounding quality in itself.

Narrative & fiction in contemporary art: a short critique

Sometimes it seems that functional modernism has become a dogma in contemporary art. Especially the theoretical discourse seems to be focussed on the last 100 years, disregarding the history of often fiction-based and narrative visual culture that our niche of contemporary art is undeniably part of. It tends to dismiss narrative to be ‘illustrative’. 

At the same time vast amounts of text are produced to provide context for art works or exhibition projects. To me, this is absurd: it’s a form of reversed narrative, story imposed upon image as opposed to image arising from story. The research might be interpreted as a counterbalance, a ‘protest’, a reminder.

Conclusion

By this multidisciplinary and controlled chaotic approach, using science next to fiction, and showing how we – as artists, but also as human beings – are deeply connected to history through art (or in a wider sense: image), I want to evoke the notion of being part of something greater, even though this sensation might last only as long as the video work or exhibition does. Art functions as a portal to other worlds and otherworldly ideas. I’m proposing to project this function in a constellation of works.

Presentation

Although exhibitions or projects in contemporary art spaces won’t be excluded – especially if the exhibition space can be transformed according to the research -, the ultimate goal is to present the works in a historical or art historical context.