‘The idea of the Human can only come from elsewhere, not from itself – the inhuman is the only evidence for it’.1
Today’s sculptural practice takes on the expanded technical range of
representation in the digital era. These newfound capabilities have
endowed us with increasingly precise control of materials, from the
visible field to the particulate and the molecular. Associated with such
mastery, analogues of real space – alterable to degrees unlimited by
physical conditions (except processor speed) – facilitate transitions
from index to remix, single to multiple, copy to version. Advances at
the intersection of mechanics and chemistry mean that such virtual items
can then make the move (back) into material by 3d printing,
nano-technology etc.
The collapse of physicality into information – along with our redefined
notions of place – mean that an object can be distributed throughout
various modes of space and time simultaneously. The distinction between
the model for a sculpture and the sculpture itself is increasingly
vague. The age of relations between discrete entities is passing, and a
practice that foregrounds the continuum is emerging.
The rhetoric of the continuum allows for the generative moment(s) of a
sculpture to proceed by chemical reactions etc: Our deeper scientific
understanding of material processes – such as interactions on the
biological/mineral plane – underpin strategies of artist-independent
object development. They also suggest a wider temporal (and hence
spatial) frame – perhaps accounting for a turn towards pre-historical,
archaeological, geological and cosmic themes. Such fields are suggestive
of organic complexity, messiness, and ungraspability, offering a useful
foil to pit against the hygienic and functionalist techno-fetishism of
mainstream digital culture.