General Thoughts (Previously posted Dec 2006)

General Thoughts

Thinking about my work, it has occurred to me that the way I work is as a hacker. By this I mean someone who uses existing materials and disassembles them, at least in part, in order to reconfigure them, often incorporating other unrelated materials, with the purpose of creating something new. I am often drawn to particular materials or processes because of the cultural meaning attached to them.

There is a general ambiguity around the term hacking but a general definition sounds positive in describing: ‘any process of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.’

Wark - Hacking

Whether the material is steam, or computer, the politics imbued in (or for that matter the physical characteristics of) a shipping container, or a historical materialism (or any other) methodology, I seek to explore the ‘material’ and how it might relate to other ‘materials’ that also catch my eye. In this respect, it could be seen that my methodology is from a postmodernist school in the sense that postmodernism is often perceived to be predominantly concerned with collage, juxtaposition and the interplay of context.

Postmodern scholars argue that such a decentralized society inevitably creates responses/perceptions that are described as post-modern, such as the rejection of what are seen as the false, imposed unities of meta-narrative and hegemony; the breaking of traditional frames of genre, structure and stylistic unity; and the overthrowing of categories that are the result of logocentrism and other forms of artificially imposed order. Instead, they value the collage of elements, the play and juxtaposition of ideas from different contexts, and the deconstruction of symbols into the basic dynamics of power and place from which those symbols gain meaning as signifiers. In this it is related to post-structuralism in philosophy, minimalism in the arts and music, the emergence of pop, and the rise of mass media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

However, in contrast to this statement, I feel that it is not possible to sweep away the old in favour of the new nor to reject ‘imposed unities of meta-narrative and hegemony’, partly because there are fundamentals that do not change; human nature is a constant (both good and bad). It is from this, perhaps peculiar, dialectical standpoint (perhaps in some ways none too dissimilar to the intellectual contradiction that Walter Benjamin encountered between his Marxist and Kabbalistic views) that I am seeking to frame my practice.