Shahree Vyaas's Blog, page 25

Whistling in the Dark

This canvas wants to bring forward the theme music in my series The Dark Arts. The third installation features a singing tree at the center of a wind hose that makes it produce a slightly discordant and penetrating choral sound covering a range of several octaves.

The theme has also worked inspired different musicians like

Whistling in the Dark (album), a 1979 album by Max Gronenthal, also known as Max Carl

Whistling in The Dark, a 2008 album by Hank Wangford & The Lost Cowboys

Whistling in the Dark, a 2006 album by Terry Garland

“Whistling in the Dark”, a song by Easterhouse

“Whistling in the Dark”, a song by They Might Be Giants from Flood

If you say that someone is whistling in the dark, you mean that they are trying to remain brave and convince themselves that the situation is not as bad as it seems.

That’s why Singing Ringing Tree is set in the landscape of the Pennine hill range overlooking Burnley, in Lancashire, England. The project was set up to erect a series of 21st-century landmarks, or Panopticons (structures providing a comprehensive view), across East Lancashire as symbols of the renaissance of the area.

Whistling in the Dark is also a 1933 American pre-Code comedy-mystery film directed by Elliott Nugent and starring Ernest Truex and Una Merkel. The plot concerns a mystery writer whose scheme for a perfect murder comes to the attention of a gangster, who plans to use it.

Dancing in the Dark

I recently started a new series that I’ve named Art in the Dark. The most stylistic characteristics of this series are that all the works have a different artistic theme, supported by a hyperbolic geometrical concept, and are executed upon a black canvas.

The first installment of this series is called Dancing in the Dark. It restyles a doodle I made for Cyber Dancer, but that I then dismissed in favor for a different design, but could recycle in this design.

Many other artists have explored this theme.  Bruce Springsteen wrote this song Dancing in the Dark about his difficulty writing a hit single and his frustration trying to write songs that will please people. His struggles pour out in the lyric “Dancin’ in the dark”, where he feels like a hired gun dying for some action.

You can’t start a fire

You can’t start a fire without a spark

This gun’s for hire

Even if we’re just dancin’ in the dark

Dancer in the Dark is also musical drama film written and directed by Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. It stars Icelandic musician Björk as a factory worker who suffers from a degenerative eye condition and is saving for an operation to prevent her young son from suffering the same fate. When a desperate neighbor falsely accuses Selma of stealing his savings, the drama of her life escalates to a tragic finale. It is one of the most painful films I had to endure.

The 2005 novel “Dancing in the Dark” by Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips explores the tensions of assuming a false identity which, in a racist society, would be considered the ‘true’ identity of the player. This catches the performer in the double bind of using the actor’s art to confirm prejudices, which then blind their audiences to that art.” The story also deals with “the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture”.

My own take upon the subject is how the lack of a coherent contemporary world vision turns most people into dancers in the dark. Many people respond to that by adapting a nihilistic attitude towards life, society, and environment. Dancing in the Dark wants to inspire people to keep up a positive approach to the reality.

The Da Vinci Trinity

Although Leonardo Da Vinci had no formal academic training, many historians and scholars regard him as the prime exemplar of the “Universal Genius” or “Renaissance Man”, an individual of “unquenchable curiosity” and “feverishly inventive imagination.” He is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. He studied engineering, sculpting, painting, architecture, science, music, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, mathematics, history, and cartography.

Though the religious aspect of Leonardo’s mental universe forms the central piece of this installation, it is doubtless that most of his convictions were carried by the wings of his artistic and scientific alter egos. Hence, the uncertain looking middle piece is flanked on the left by an image that represents his artistical drive and on the right the critical scientifical facet of his personality.

For the execution of this tryptic I chose the polygonal style. This sprouts partially the fact that Leonardo was the classic example of a universal polymath and my own cryptomathically inclination to solve specific problems or as foundation of my artistic approach. It has always been my conviction that the style used to create a work of art should be determined by the subject and not vice versa. Too many artists are held prisoner by a style that they consider as their personal trademark, making it for them difficult to leave the field of their primary artistic inspiration. Polygon art, often referred to as low poly art, is one of the most iconic art styles in our modern era. With its minimalistic approach, low poly art prefers simple colors and geometric shapes over fine details and lifelike realism. I believe that Leonardo would have liked it.

The Binary Perspective

The featured image is an installation of two canvasses that explores the binary nature of the reality by contrasting male to female, water to fire, vertical to horizontal, oval to rectangle, natural to artificial, and much more …

Although I have given the design of this installation many thoughts, I feel a certain reluctance to share those thoughts publicly. After all, the word “binary” was originally mostly used to refer to Boolean mathematics that form the foundation for all computer programs. Nowadays the word is more widely used to indicate different ways of thinking, behaving, and describing the reality.

I’m releasing this work as an open invitation to everyone to develop their own relation with it and hope that it will add to the perspective they have upon the reality.

A Cosmology of Civilization

The aim of this painting is to visualize the similarities that are existing between the cosmical cycles and that of the civilization process. It is also the cover for a music album that features an opera with the same title. The description of that album will go into more detail about the used symbolism.

This work does not have the ambition to be overwhelming original, but often limits itself to recycle existing ideas and themes in a coherent contemporary context.

This can be illustrated by having a close look at the painting. It restyles much of the themes and subjects that have been developed by Salvador Dali in some of his lesser-known creations.

You can listen to the English version of the opera on You tube by clicking on this link.

Cyberhive

Cyberhive (canvas 60′ x 60′) tries to visualize the manifestation of a multi-dimensional cybernetic system in the time-space continuum and is the capstone on the eight-part series “Cybernetic Musings”.

As a system where different minds come together to create or destroy information, the existence of a cyberhive mind is as real as that of the individual human mind that runs upon some biological hardware called “brain”.

In this canvas the hivemind is represented by a geometrical design that sits comfortably within a matrix created by three Fibonacci constructs, projected against the background of the universe as we know it.

Expectations

This canvas (W 30′ x H 36′) is the 7th installation in my collection Cybernetic Musings.

As shown in other canvasses in this series, I have mixed feelings about recent developments in the new information technology and the developing cyberspace that vacillate between optimism and pessimism.

However, the dominant emotion is one of expectation tempered by an innate knowledge of human nature. The Chinese invented the gun powder, the compass, and the printing press. There is no doubt that they have been tools that lifted human civilization to a higher level, but have also been tools to kill, conquer, and indoctrinate.

Millennials have been born into a society that was already in an accelerating digitalization process that reaches even the most remote parts of the world. They are also the generation with the biggest hopes and the deepest distrust into the new information technology. They have mixed expectations that hover between an interconnected world where man and machine work for the benefit of all and a matrix dystopia.

The Birth of the Cyberspace

The term cyberspace was first used by the American-Canadian author William Gibson in 1982 in a story published in Omni magazine and then in his book Neuromancer. In this science-fiction novel, Gibson described cyberspace as the creation of a computer network in a world filled with artificially intelligent beings.

The real cyberspace is a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information systems infrastructures including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers. The purpose of cyberspace is to create, store, exchange, share, modify, extract, use and eliminate information.

The birth of the cyberspace also lead to a number of specific challenges for leadership, especially with respect to sense-making, meaning making, decision making, termination, and learning. There is no doubt that the birth of the cyberspace has caused many businesses to go bankrupt. Like the invention of the printing press, some businesses have been able to thrive because of it, and others have not.

One of the most significant ways that websites and the Internet have affected businesses is online shopping. On the one hand, it has helped small businesses compete with more prominent companies because they can use websites to drive traffic to their site and sell their products. On the other hand, it has made it tough on large department stores because customers can easily order products online instead of going out to buy them.

Many businesses have been pushed to bankruptcy because of the birth of the cyberspace. Christopher Mims argues in his latest book  “Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door – Why Everything Has Changed About How And What We Buy” that the internet has killed more jobs than the industrial revolution.

While cyberspace has become central to all vital processes in the global economy and people’s social lives, it also carries a wide variety of risks. Framing these risks is no easy feat: Some lead to harm in cyberspace itself, while others lead to harm in the offline world as well. The worst cyber events can now cause bodily harm or deaths, political crises, and multibillion-dollar economic losses. As digital networks interlink with the physical world in complex, dynamic, and opaque ways, many observers fear new forms of fragility that no one understands.

Here be Rats …

This artwork is part of a series of five paintings that is called Cybernetic Musings. In these series I explore recent developments into the cyberspace.

The title of this work refers to an old annotation that medieval cartographers made upon unexplored territories “Here be dragons” and also refers to one of my own works where I explored the planetary time-space.

Recent evolutions into the information technology have created many new opportunities but have also incorporated many old pitfalls. While the newly created cyberspace has still many unexplored venues, the biggest challenges aren’t caused by dragons but by rats or rat related behavior.

Cyber-rats manifest similar behavior as their physical counterparts: they’re running rat-races, spread viruses, parasite on the works of others, … the list is not complete, but it’s enough of a hint to start your own reflection about the new window that you opened to your house and working place. Cyber security is bigger business than pest control.

The Connected Mind

The featuring image is part of a series where I let my mind wander about different subjects and then distillate them in a series of paintings that is called “Cybernetic Musings”.

This post concerns itself with the impact neurological implants may have upon civilization. It is my opinion that this near-future development will start as a beneficially one, to help people with disabilities to link protheses with their neurological system or to connect the brain to access all kinds of computer systems which would greatly enlarge our perceptual scope.

The only downfall that I perceive here is that people may just lose their ability to learn new skills by relying on just another upgrade of their implants. It has the potential to create a massive dependency upon the available information technology where the technology isn’t any longer a prolongation of the human but the human becomes a prolongation of the cyberspace. This trend can already be perceived in the massive dependency upon their smartphones and (free?) internet platforms that some people have developed. Where not so long ago people who commute by public transport used to read their newspapers and discuss its content with fellow commuters, they’re right now reduced to some scrolling likers or brainless Ping-Pong gamers.

Knowing human nature, it will not take too long before some military/corporate/political masterminds will start to ponder how those implants can be used as a weapon. As ways to control population behavior or to enforce some kind of assimilation that is in line with the doctrine that the ruling class wants to propagate. It would also add a complete different dimension to the definition of a cyberwar.