I re-added the work I’ve done for MA Fine Art onto the website, which helped me see how it fits in with my other work. The work angers me, possibly because of the association with the pandemic, and how our cohort got shortchanged. We still had to pay full tuition fee, even though we had limited access to the workshops, and a lot of the times, we had online lectures. We didn’t even get a physical show at the end of the course.
I’m working on a topic called fractional distillation on applied science at the moment, and I can see this process with my art education. This might apply to others, but I’m not sure. Undergraduate, postgraduate and doctorate have different boiling points, and fractional distillation separates the degrees in which the substances (knowledge) condenses. Abstract information has a higher boiling point than tangible information, and grit is the temperature. This process is a time consuming and expensive one, but has a great yield.
I’m seeing this pattern in my art education, where in BA Fine Art, my focus was on the aesthetics of art and science. My focus became more abstract to look at the mirror stage as a device for self-awareness. So going up a stage, it’s plausible that instead of looking at the aesthetics of the disciplines, I’d apply it to create original knowledge. [This made more sense in my head than in writing.]
Looking at what I’ve done for MA Fine Art, I quickly read information on the Greek mythology of Narcissus, and I think it applies in infatuation. In the mythology, Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, but it’s about infatuation rather than a literal ‘he fell in love with himself’. When a person is infatuated, they project their own desired qualities to fill in the gap of what they don’t know about that person. In doing so, they fall for their own reflection (a méconnaissance, mistaking the ideal image for the total self). Social media distorts it further. I added a photo I took of an example of diffraction grating, because the light was dispersed into different frequencies, but it’s curious how it’s only the red, yellow and green out of ROYGBIV. Maybe it’s saying something poetic about méconnaissance.
I made an artwork the other day.
This is Kafka’s metamorphosis, a prokaryotic cell, and the society we know today, blended together.