Well, it’s certainly been a test for my brian to sort out precisely what my thesis and project will be about; it’s not as easy as coming up with an idea, you have to be able to spell out the whole framework of your thesis and practical project and prove your ideas in advance! I suppose having a really cogent and impenetrable argument at this stage will save many headaches later!
Here’s my current concept, based around the realisation that all my work has a lot in common with Romantic movement from the late 19th Century. I realised Romantacism represents a nice lens through which I can consider all the ideas I’ve been discussing, and it very neatly represents the expression vs. realism argument I have been considering.
Most crucially, it ties my creative work and practical intentions to my theoretical preoccupation - it’s an established, researchable movement that my work has a lot in common with, and also mirrors closely my notion of expression vs. realism & human vs. technology.
So, the flow of ideas is:
Realism
- accurate
- mimics life
- simulation
- objective
- rational
- “the world is…”
Expression
- artistic
- personal/internal
- subjective
- variable
- emotional
- “an experience of the world…”
Romanticism
- emphasizes the power of nature
- strong emotion as aesthetic experience
- the power of the sublime
- against rationalism
- the individual imagination as a critical authority
Caspar David Friedrich (German Romantic painter)
- symbolic, balanced composition
- mainly naturalistic in style
- depicts power of nature
- Pantheism (God is all)
- our existential solitude
- some landscapes considered a “biblical apocalypse”
- figures seen from back, ‘medium’ between viewer and subject
His words and paintings:
“Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye, then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may reflect on others from the outside inwards.”
“The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself”
So my current argument proposes that:
1) 3D originates from technology
2) at first scientists create simulations (rational)
3) shortly after artists create expression (emotional)
4) most 3D work in the decades since plays on the dychotomy of the two
5) my work deals with this clash of aesthetics through the concepts of rationalism & the emotional through a Romantic lens
6) my work visually is somewhere between the realism of Friedrich and the expression of the ‘image inside’ he speaks of
7) tends to be romantic in tone, consciously dealing with struggle against rationalism, conservatism, and even the technology of own medium
8 ) most likely communicated through representation of industry vs. nature, human vs. industry, human in nature(in the new media context of my work, the Romantic observation could perhaps change from “humankind overcome by the sublime power of the natural world” to “humankind overcome by the sublime power of the technological world”)
The most exciting part of looking at Romanticism is the ways in which the ideas might apply today, but in a modified context where technology has become a major force. My New Media practice may well reflect the extent to which the sublime power of nature, seen in Friedrich’s paintings as an all encompassing source of strong human emotion and isolation, and principal to his creative expression, has been replaced by the sublime power of technology, frequently just as all-encompassing and isolating, but necessary for my creative work. And while my experience with technology is certainly constant, powerful, and necessary for my creative expression, my work plays on an impending sense of disaster that the technological world might destroy us.
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