The 64 montages included in the Screen eScape series were completed in 2003. With only a few exceptions, they are mostly based on the juxtaposition of hand-drawn images with photo-images. This type of juxtaposition was not new in my work. However, previously it had consisted mostly of inserting photographic snapshots into traditional drawings — as occurred in the Reaching I Ching Series (Multimedia eScapes Numbers 1 and 35), where the graphically depicted rooms revealed a photographic jade forest outside the window. The gloss of the photograph captured the sense of glass, since it was in the context of the flat-toned ink drawing of an interior. The present series of screen eScape montages reverses this format by inserting drawings from my sketchbooks into the prime position, not as drawings but as photographs-of-drawings. They may be central in the images, but they have lost their sense of being original drawings in their original, graphic format. They have become, rather, samples of simulacra. Their contextual centrality, however, lifts them to the level of heroic (larger-than-life). As such their strength relies both on their having been removed from their original sources and from the strength of the originals from which they have been removed. Hopefully this enables them to saturate a viewer’s experience with insight into the seductive and invasive persistence of the vast array of virtual screens that pervade every corner of contemporary  life.

The montage backgrounds/surrounds for the photographs of the drawings (and in a few cases photographs of nature) were composed by cutting-up pieces from my collection of photographs that had been taken over many years — but that also included some recent examples. What is significant about these photographic images is that they were never felt to be satisfactory as images on their own, and further, that they were not taken with their montage destiny in mind. In short, they were available to be inserted into the montages because they were out-casts. That these invariably held wondrous sections here and there, made them perfect for the project. The use of geometric, ‘leftover’ lines (between the cut pieces) became the chosen means to represent the tensions that emerge when fragments of 'nature' are cut and the new edges are juxtaposed against other cut edges of fragments. The lines existed by virtue of their absence as graphic lines in that they were not drawn but left untouched as negative spaces — themselves caught within the confines of the background area that surroundes the screens; cast as surrounds they thus act as an additional layer of negative space. (These non-screen, negative spaces actively energize the figurative, positive spaces occupied by the screens ). That both fragments on either side of the cut, geometric separation-lines can scream out about their severance and the resulting reduction to a state of implied continuity beyond the cut (or phantom pain) hopefully evokes an absence that radiates tension. It's an absence that tries to evoke a feeling of separation, and as such, one that speaks to the increasingly overt war between the natural and the cultural. (Nature is formed from the inside as cell division, for example; on the other hand, cultural is constructed by reforming nature from the outside; a tree limb grows organically from the inside, while a board is cut geometrically, from the outside.) Unlike the variable quality of the organic, the rigid geometric is a designer-based construct and as such typically imposes on the interior organic an externally imposed ‘geometry.’

 

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  The 64 Montage Screen eScapes (2003)

The Screen eScapes, as a series of montages, can be read as drawings; that is, the shapes throughout each work are outlined by graphic dark-lines. Surprisingly, however, this dynamic is presented as an absence of the very quality that would render it as present; that is, absent are the hand-made markings that traditionally constitute the act of drawing. Physically, the lines are the leftover spaces that remain untouched; as such, the gestural, hand-made dynamic intrinsic to graphics is entirely absent, physically, even as it remains fully present psychically.

To further shift the logic in the reading of the images as drawings, there are typically ‘real’ drawings in the ‘screen’ areas that are centralized in each work. But upon further engagement, it should soon become apparent that they too are deflections: they are not drawings as such, but rather photographs-of-drawings; they are rendered as removed versions of what they seem to be—of what they once were. Further, they are not photographs in the privileged Fine Arts sense as much as they are snapshots—pervasive and common—and are often clipped of their snaspshot rectangular continuity. They are then contextualized to appear large in scale and screen-like in quality—two characteristics that they propose to carry in spite of the absence of both. This reversal of what may be the most digitized interface zone in the world, the screen, forced to act as a carrier of what may be the most immediate, un-digitized form of image-making, that is, drawing, may explain something of the paradoxical sensibility that lurks within these montage worlds. This conjuncture is further interrogated by the radical context in which the screens have been installed: they are inserted into natural and cultural environments with an audacity that seems completely permanent no less than it seems fragile and unexpected. The sable aspect is enhanced by the structural support of angular lines that serve to fix areas in place (and to transfix the space), while the transient aspect gains its fragility by means of the lack of predictable expectations relative to the perception of everyday space as normally experienced. Virtual screens are elusive and at the mercy of the continuity and enduance (or lack of it) that is supplied by the technics that feed them.

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The interplay among the diverse, cut photographic shapes (diverse in that they are from unrelated terrains and times), when radically juxtaposed, endows them with a sense of communal longing, a longing for their lost continuity. The parts that have been cut away, at the edge of each configuration, are clearly absent, but they are present beyond the edge in the sense that their continuity is typically implied. One can imagine the missing parts. When two such implied continuities are juxtaposed, the result is theoretically the presence of a double absence, and the sense of discontinuity is potentially heightened. This tension along the edge of a severed configuration attains additional strength in the special case where the figure, in the form of the privileged hand-drawn surface that is the screen, is contiguous with the photographic ground, that is, with the surround that is the underprivileged context. The figure and the ground are foreigners to each other, not only in the means of representation but also in the represented meanings. For example, the background gathers attention by virtue of its complex means of interrogating and challenging the flatness of the picture plane, while the screen sustains an affinity with the picture plane—even as it often subtly challenges this relationship through tilts and recessions.

There is another loss/gain paradox in the character of the configurations: the use of strict geometry throughout the Screen eScape images (avoiding even the use of curved lines) imposes a cultural ethos on the images that radicalizes their source in nature. Geometry can be seen here as an external imposition of rigid grids that undercut the (non-geometric) inner growth patterns so typical of nature. Does the use of geometric configuration pay homage to, or disregard, the origins of the Screen eSpace meanings in nature—meanings that may be seen as constituting the lifeblood of the artworks? The multiple layering of the lost continuities throughout each image, then, and in particular those that occur where the figure (the screen) and the (back)ground meet, theoretically opens a challenge to viewers to try to construct a higher order. Is there here, then, not a need for viewers to try to regain an overall continuity, perhaps one that can sustain an interrelation among the present/absent parts—one that can emerge, even if unconsciously, in each reader’s search for a personal in-depth intrinsic sense of meaning?

 The 64 Montage Screen eScapes (2003)

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“That we live in a culture of proliferating screens – cinema, television, computers, ABMs, medical imaging, airport surveillance screens – is already a truism: technology as cliché. What is less evident is the silent, but very real, impact of screen culture on our psycho-geography: the psychological terror of human imagination and perception, our sense of space and time, conceptions of what is real and what is unreal, questions of identity and truth-saying, indeed, ‘truth-seeing.’ In ways complex, often misunderstood and deeply mysterious, we may already be (italics added) the invisible environment of screens in the wires, exhausted media travelers into whose bodies and minds the psychic surgery of electronic technologies of communication puts down its hooks: radically altering the deepest language of human perception, shape-shifting, the boundaries of the real, speeding up the meaning of time itself, and transforming visual space into an artificial horizon. Living in a culture dominated by screens in the wires means that without our consent and certainly in the absence of conscious deliberation, we have committed ourselves to life as a continuously altered reality. When the screens of media culture go inside the mind, then we find ourselves unexpectedly in a new psych-geography…” (page 18, Kroker, Marielouise & Arthur, Life in the Wires, The CTheory Reader, NWP, 2004)

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The 64 Montage Screen eScapes (2003)