Artist Spotlight
Tyson Parks
Tyson Parks is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores the relationships between people and technology, with an interest in how perception affects human understanding in a technology-saturated world. We spoke with the artist about his latest series Branes, a collection of virtual sculptures that traverse dimensional scales.
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Inspiration
Modern life is driven by needs and desires to integrate with new technologies and stay up-to-date with these technologies as they rapidly evolve. With technology we are constantly trying to reinvent ourselves as part of the ‘future.’ I am interested in how these integrations affect the way we think and feel; the ways in which technologies create new constructs for perception and intelligence. I try to identify and exploit novel aspects of technological interactions that have an illusory effect on humans.
For example, maybe the most prevalent theme I’ve explored is how the everyday human visual experience has been affected by photography and now, by screens. A more abstract generalization of this would be the exploration of the processes of visual projection between three-dimensional and two-dimensional existences. Almost every project I’ve made in the last 3–4 years plays with the consequences of jumping up and down the dimensional scales. These interests were born from reading Wassilly Kandinsky’s treatise on abstract painting called Point, Line, to Plane and further excited by Edwin A. Abbott’s sci-fi masterpiece, Flatland.
An increasing amount of our daily life experiences consist of viewing a 2D projection of reality through a framed flat screen. That’s a fairly new experience but it’s already become prevalent. As camera, screen, and simulation technology become better, this virtual reality experience conflates with our true reality experience, which is seen as the ultimate goal of virtual reality; to cross the supposed uncanny valley. As we cross the uncanny valley, and accept a variety artificial realities to be just as real as our true reality, does our ability to fully experience and perceive true reality diminish? I’d wager that there’s more going on.
Creative Process
My creative process is intentionally inconsistent from one project to the next so that I might approach each new subject with a new process. Much of my work ends up being as much about the creation of the process that creates the work as it is about the work that is actually created. Conceptually I am very interested in dissolving boundaries between the act of creating and the final creation itself. Projects such as Wave Painter, GMVF Paintings, Spun, and Squint are all representations of different approaches to this goal.
For example, with my project Squint, I invented a new process which I describe as ‘temporal kinetic anamorphosis’. Traditional anamorphosis in art is a process for encoding an image with abstraction through controlled distortion while also giving the viewer a way to decode that abstraction through the use of curved mirrors or perspective.
While traditional anamorphosis is limited to static two dimensional scenes, my process creates an experience in which a three dimensional sculpture is encoded — and decoded — through the synchronization of motion in a space and real-time video processing that draws upon the memory of a camera’s live feed of the object. The work is not about the sculptural object I created for the piece, but rather, it’s about the experience of the process of that sculpture being transformed within the gallery space.
Brane Series
The idea of ‘sculpture’ relies heavily on physicality; on three-dimensionality, and an object’s existence spatially. But what if sculpture was more about time, than space? “Branes” is a series of sculptural works that imagines the idea of sculpture as it might exist via quantum physics. In string theory, a brane is a physical object that generalizes the notion of matter that can inhabit zero to many dimensions.
Wikipedia’s Mathematical viewpoint definition of a brane reads:
“Mathematically, branes can be described… (as) a mathematical structure consisting of objects, and for any pair of objects, a set of morphisms between them.”
Within the context of my series, I like to think about a brane as not necessarily having two or more solid states that an object is morphing between, but rather I like to imagine that the morph itself is a fourth dimension of the sculpture. This morph dimension is invisible to the human eye but can have a shape and form just as solid, defined, and complex as any of the the other shapes and forms that define the three solid dimensions of that sculpture. So while initially I was interested in creating objects that morphed between two different solid states, which might have a morph dimension that I imagine would look just like a straight line between two points, now I am trying to explore as complex morph shapes as possible. The practice of creating these works are truly rewiring my brain. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to think in four-dimensional holograms like dolphins do!
Tyson Parks is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores how perception affects human understanding in a technology-saturated world.
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