Aesthetics in the specious present : the sensorial immediacy of digital abstraction

My artistic practice aims to destabilise visual language by emphasising the shifting durational experience of sensate immediacy where perception brings about meaning through an interdependence between temporality and consciousness. I propose that in the shift from analog to digital systems, temporality plays a more significant aesthetic role than has previously been recognised in creative practices. The way that media has come to be understood is culturally ingrained in the way we understand objects and use language to describe the world around us. It is difficult to consider an alternate system that preferences something other than the physical properties of a given medium. I submit that the malleable interconnected structure of digital media challenges the pre-existing relationship between media and aesthetics. Abstraction is central to both my creative process and to the proposition that experience of vision in a digitalised culture has changed; abstraction enables digital temporality to manipulate our own time-consciousness. The primary concern of my studio investigations is to convey a sense of immediacy through an exploration of process that references the altered nature of perceptual experience in digital culture. My art practice takes the form of collaborative digital performances and installations with contemporary dancers and choreographers. In my exegesis I will document and discuss three preliminary investigations: Per/, Rorschach and Untitled, and my final major investigation Proximate Edifice. The intention of my research is to investigate the interdependent relationships between movement, sensation, abstraction and immediacy. By establishing various rules of interconnection through code­ driven processual strategies for generating images, scripting interactive scenarios, and exploring improvisation in relation to mediated performance and image-making I am able to express these relationships as a durational aesthetic that alters one's time-consciousness.