James K-M
Ceremony of Privacy, 2024
This work is called Ceremony of Privacy in which I am retrieving the early days of print media about digital culture, when there was initially an artistic innocence and an optimistic creativity, and an artistic paradise hidden and lost before it could barely begin. I suggest in this work a paradise regained through the analogue and ceremonial.
My intention is to question the pervasive nature of this technology and offer artistic interpretations for our metaphysical reflection.
Therefore, what are the metaphysics of privacy in the digital age? McLuhan was all about how to retain our metaphysics, by maintaining our perceptivity and vulnerability, and to be able to find the switch to turn off any pervasive interference. I believe this could be valuable in any age though, as media environments always exist and are pervasive at any time. As Barrington Nevitt said in Who Was Marshall McLuhan (1994), we should maintain a non-stop dialogue with our creator and for that we don’t even need to be verbal, let alone grammatical.
In a McLuhan approach, what is our concern for privacy an extension of? I propose that it is an extension of the metaphysics in each of us that remains hidden and seemingly private. Our concern for privacy, free speech, security and identity in a digital age is a simulation of a metaphysical concern.
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I got my first email address in 1991 when I enrolled in the new Applied Information Technology programme at Capilano College. As well, buying a Mac Classic with 2 mg of ram and a 20 mg hard drive were minimum requirements. Having been a painter for the previous 15 years was a cause for concern because, aside from much needed employment possibilities a more urgent question was, could I make art with a computer? The answer became a qualified, of course, this is just another medium.
So, during the next 15 years of frequent employment, but also experimentation with interactive art and digital print, something became lacking and I just had to let it all go and return to painting, and then sculpture. That is, a return to analogue.
During that second 15 year period, I taught Macromedia Director, Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, as well as media literacy, creative process and portfolio production, at the Vancouver Film School Multimedia and Langara College Electronic Media Design. I presented at ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Montreal (1995) and Rotterdam (1996). I produced two interactive CD/DVD-ROMs, Restless Machines: Noise and Industrial Culture, and the Telefilm funded Electric Living in Canada, which asked artists who use technology to “think out loud” about the emerging language of interactive media. I was co-founder of the Digitalis Digital Print Society and curated 6 international print exhibitions, two in association with the New Forms Festival, Vancouver. One of these exhibitions was entitled The Spiritual in Digital Art (2003), and was inspired by the 1987 exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890 - 1985, which included Mark Rothko, Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Georgia O'Keefe, Joseph Beuys, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and many others.
My recent analogue exhibitions include re:location (Salt Spring Island, 2024), and Complicit Landscapes (2021) and Farmacia (2019) at the 14th and 13th Havana Biennials.