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440 Digital Salon Artists’ Statements ful, but knowing the image sources and seeing the actual specimens —both alive and dead—I would say there is an underlying gruesomeness about the work. JONATHAN MORSE For almost thirty years I have not been comfortable “taking” a picture (those seen images of the world around me I can simply remember), preferring to “make” a picture instead. What was so complex then with traditional photo-printmaking methods (camera color separation with filters, stripping negatives, etc.) can of course now be done in real time on anyone’s computer. Our lives are collages of textures and impressions, input from here and from there, pastiches of pleasures recalled and pain endured. My current work too is not-so-seamlessly cut and pasted , revised, and revisited, and draws upon all my experience. Our daily lives may seem routine, so how nice it is to find that in our art space we can paint caves again or simply howl at the moon. I’ll leave the real world to those other photographers to place their well-worn rectangles upon, for the visions I assemble become truly my own. I come from a photo background, but I have long known that for me photographing is the creation of a database rather than an end in itself. What do I photograph? Whatever interests me at the time: faces, masks, models with flowers and buttons, paint sprayed or dripped onto the sidewalk, textures, graffiti, gas meters, danger cones. These are stored onto Kodak photo CD, an easy medium for finding and reusing bits and pieces of photographic data in the creation of new images. I see so many artists using digital printing as a way to simply copy and reproduce their existing paintings or drawings. What a waste. To me, digital imaging is its own medium; the original is what comes out of the printer, not what’s on the monitor or whatever the project started with. The digital form allows for a confluence of media sources and cultural influences in the service of making something new, personal, and unique—not just multiples of what you already created before. I first started outputting to Cibachrome, then, when I discovered the Iris printer, to watercolor “fine art” paper. The images I have submitted are printed on a glossy canvas substrate designed specifically for Iris printing, then stretched onto 1 1/2–inch stretcher bars. The result is a hybrid photopainting media with depth and richness that allows (in several of the pieces) for exploration of the edges of the stretched canvas as a place to continue the image rather than solely to support it physically. I must confess: I am a primitive Photoshop user. My edges are rough, my cuts and pastes are just that. I would never be able to create the seamless visual worlds shown in glossy advertisements, beautiful as they are. As the cliché so aptly goes, art must mirror life in order for the artist and the viewer both to find some relevance. Our lives (or mine anyway) are not linear paths, nor are the images that I make. I am an assemblage of competing and sometimes conflicting interests and responsibilities, past actions and reactions, and future hopes, plans, and fears. Digital artistry mirrors that process of construction and deconstruction through which the past becomes the new, and through which we literarily make our mark. JAMES K-M AND CAROL SILL (ELECTRIC LIVING PRODUCTIONS LTD.) ELECTRICANADA At Electric Living, we build a culture of environments that is both embodied and disembodied as a reflection of our current condition. Electric Living can be seen as a biological chip for process pattern recognition, a means of re-cognizing patterns of convergence. The point is not only to recognize patterns, but to come to pure percept, direct perception. How to get to that? Religion, drugs, art, Burning Man (www.burningman.com)? We work toward direct perception, in which the act of perception expands consciousness. At the point of percept, you embody the fulfillment of the old desire for a physical god. The religious subculture, a grand embodiment of interpretation, cannot replace the true goal of that gesture, which is the direct...

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