Cylinder seals are an ancient form of signature that at first glance appears to be a finely crafted object of abstract origin. Intricate carvings make up the surface of these mysterious objects. They were often made of hard stone that over many years would wear away and break. They were important to their carriers and held status as jewelry or sacred object, like a crest. But the unseen beauty revealed underneath is the key. When rolled out across a soft surface, they acted as a stamp. As one rolls out the seal, more of the narrative became embedded across the surface. They are a form of impression seal like stamps or finger ring signets. The images depicted on cylinder seals are theme-driven, often sociological or religious.

The authority of the seal falls back in importance due to the narrative nature of the devices. It would be better to address their thematic nature, since they present ideas of ancient society in pictographic and text form. This is where the seal truly becomes a unique signature. The signature as story is specifically where my obsession lies.

I’m fascinated by exploring inside ancient art, any qualities that cause it to become contemporary to us. In fact, the more broken or fragmented the art, the more special it becomes. The parts of these objects (in this case cylinder seals) become more interesting over time as less of the story is able to be unraveled. The art becomes more enigmatic and magical. In a very Baudrillard-ian sense it has become the fulfillment of a story that lost its origin. The context has become modern and its past forgotten, despite the story it contains being ancient and legible. The pieces of it that are missing, both culturally and physically, are the blanks for us to fill in ourselves into the art.

There is something powerful in that relationship, that place between the old and new where we can see ourselves. As we fit into the architecture of a story originally not deigned for us, we make the objects timeless. The wear of time has made these one of the first dynamic visual arts, long before computers and interactive experiences. Cylinder seals are a compact container for this metaphor but it is not restricted to them. Ancient architecture, sculpture and visual art all share elements of this. When we re-define our history through fragmentation, it becomes a sand castle we can stand upon to have vision.

As an artist coming from the world of technology, one is often drawn to the appeal of the New Aesthetic as a source of inspiration. I don’t dislike the New Aesthetic. I find it interesting that we look to the failure of technology to better understand it’s nature and the way that it is beginning to see the world and itself. I just find it rather odd that we wouldn’t look to our own vision and find the place in between. James Bridle said this at his 2012 SXSW talk:

There somewhere in this process human intervention kind of failed and the machine itself was allowed to speak… The machines aren’t very smart yet, but we’re teaching them this stuff all the time. We’re giving them eyes and ears and we’re giving them access to our world. We’re sharing our social spaces with them increasingly. They increasingly live like the render ghosts, on the borders of our world, and they’re starting to share it with this. These technologies that we’re creating increasingly resemble us, and it’s sort of possible to talk to them.

I think that it is fascinating to examine this but I begin to wonder where the humanity really comes into play. Cory Arcangel clones Mario clouds and many are clones of Arcangel. When we start getting into examining the fragments and varied inconclusive stories of our own history, we can more successfully mesh them with the future technologies. I’m sure at some point, the cylinder seal was a pinnacle of technological achievement. When the framework for that storytelling has broken down, similar to the breakdown of computer code, there is similarly a newfound story to be told.

The difference is, that we have thousands of years of art history to draw from, and the communication we have is with the culture of us not the emerging culture of computers to each other. I’d like to get away from the premise of failure as direct catalyst for artistic interpretation. We, as contemporary artists and makers need to think on this space quite a bit. Maybe a perusal of decayed, ancient art re-examined with just the right amount of missing cultural association will allow us to be more emotively connected with our human past and reinterpret our emerging technological expressions.