Time's up. This must be the one.

I'm applying for another deserving artist award. Here is the statement I've come up with:

James Koehnline - Artist Statement

“Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
-Marshall McLuhan

“Art is anything you can get away with.”
-Marshall McLuhan

I have long had a driving interest in the origins, mechanisms, past and future of consciousness. I’ve never been content with supernatural/metaphysical explanations. The ideas that I have found most compelling over thirty years of reading, that have flooded me with images I’ve felt compelled to work with, have come from the work of Julian Jaynes, Daniel Dennett, Marshall McLuhan and Robert Anton Wilson, among others.

I have also made a quixotic effort, over the years, to keep abreast of the future, gathering intriguing bits and pieces into collages of possibility, and lately tracking our march toward the “technological singularity,” a possible event horizon at the point when A.I., genomics and nanotechnology will be advancing, merging and mutating so fast that the future will no longer be imaginable, let alone predictable.

Ever since William Gibson invented “cyberspace” in his early-1980s novels, I was waiting for the World Wide Web to come along and start the show. When it did, I bought my first computer, put away my art supplies, as well as the scalpel and spray glue I’d made a thousand collages with, and took the plunge into the nascent sea of pixels and x-y-z space.

My studies have led me to suspect that I am a marginally conscious robot running on imprinted habit programs, a cyborg (amalgam of biology and technological extensions) living in a virtual world of my own creation --the model of the world I’ve built in my brain, with which I interact (Wilson). The software of social communication, language, may well be what led to consciousness (self-awareness, introspectable mindspace) to begin with, as recently as three or four thousand years ago (Jaynes), and each new medium is a new kind of software, fundamentally altering human societies and consciousness itself (McLuhan). It was over 500 years after Gutenberg before half the world was literate, and yet the culture of the Book has profoundly shaped our societies and our selves. Now it is predicted with some certainly that over half the world will be online by 2012. Whether or not anything quite like “cyberspace” actually emerges, a huge upgrade to human software seems to be in progress. My four-year-old son will reach adulthood in a different world with a different kind of consciousness.

My recent work embraces the theme of Lost Books, the good old book, which also symbolizes myself, a creature of books, adrift in an inchoate Dataverse. The culture of print tries to hold back the tide, or struggles to remain relevant by reimagining itself for the highly interactive, digital multimedia Web. And of course the Web is just the infant form of whatever is coming.

My inspirations in the art world are many, including, first and foremost, the exhibition, Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art at SAAM, especially Xu Bing’s works, for his playful deconstruction of the mystique of the book, and of language itself; also Borges’ short stories, Neal Stephenson’s historical and speculative fictions (especially Diamond Age) and Peter Greenaway’s film, Prospero’s Books.

A powerful influence from my childhood was my father’s library, with emphases on surreal and fantastic art (especially Max Ernst), William Blake and James Joyce scholarship, science fiction and the fine volumes of the Limited Editions Club. Ernie Kovacs’ TV special, Eugene, with its surreal library, also impressed me as a young child.

Thus far, my Lost Books have mostly been confined to my online galleries, particularly the ones at deviantArt.com, where I have a gallery of 900 works, and have created the Lost Book Club and Museum, which currently has about fifty members and 350 works in its gallery. One of my recent pieces was used as a poster for a literature and cognitive science seminar at Stanford University.

I would like to exhibit these works in an assemblage of sculptural and digital elements (flat screen or projection), the book and its content, and to publish a book of Lost Books (ideally with an electronic paper cover, like the forthcoming anniversary issue of Esquire). I have also long contemplated the creation of a card deck, a kind of 21st century tarot for navigating the near future, updating McLuhan’s 1969 Distant Early Warning cards.

In speaking of robots, cyborgs and virtual worlds, I am not conjuring a high-tech future. These are metaphors that seem applicable to the brief history of human consciousness. As a species, embedded in the web of life, we haven’t a clue where our investigations may lead us, or what the limits of our potential may be. We gravitate to narratives and systems that promise certainty, but I believe, as quantum theory suggests...

The Universe contains a MAYBE.


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The technology behind Esquire's animated, "electronic paper" anniversary cover (October 2008 issue)
[link]

[Diagram and pics online]
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Posted an announcement for contest (see below) in News: [link]
Please fav it so it will get some exposure.

I've just announced a new contest over at The Lost Book Club and Museum, the theme of which is THE BOOK OF THE FUTURE, which can be interpreted any way you like. Everyone is invited to play, and I really encourage writers to enter. This time around I can imagine giving the jackpot (still to be collected) to a really good book report on an imagined book, or a speculative essay, as easily as a work of visual art.

Even though the theme is not limited to books from the future, I would love to collect some good examples of such from fiction (mostly science fiction, I suppose).

Other than a lot of future chronicles, in which the object itself is not fleshed-out, the one that stands out in my mind is A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.

Do you have any favorite books from the future?

For Life, Liberty, Love and Levity.

I am the founder and curator of:

and a member of: