Continuous Presence is a series of screen/audio based digital artworks that contemplates our associations and relationships with concepts of originality & truth, the real and fake. Its an observation that screens have replaced the fire as our night time companions. Maybe its a frustration that no matter what I make people are more often satisfied when sat in front of a piece of wood on fire. Or, perhaps, a mirror held up to the tech-art world where high ideas and expensive technology only ever seems to nurse our urge for something that moves, no more profound or effective then some combusting wood. Maybe its exposure therapy, curing my insecurity and frustraition at how well 10hr live streams of wood fires satiates my desire for one. Maybe its because a large part of my childhood was setting fire to things.
We see a simulated fire, using the current state-of-the art hardware. Ever reaching a closer and closer resemblance to faithful recreation, is counteracted by a black mirrored surface, and an inability to nourish any sense other than our sight, creating a sense of dissonance.
On one hand the perennial relationship to fire, one of warmth, sustenance, shelter, in memory and emotion reciprocates warm emotions inside ourselves, while the cold materiality of the work and its two-dimensionality amplify it's inability to properly satisfy us.
Tree-like thoughts
Of one’s and naughts
Cables, fraught.
Distilled rock,
Cajoled Pixels,
Etched Memory.
