Gordon Darling
Untitled (fragmented media)
This series of works has been developed to engage the viewer in decoding media information. Technical decisions have been made in response to emotional triggers embodied in the artworks. The intention is to comment on the ways we use language across social media, underlying or obvious, conscious or automatic. The work is also concerned with ideas relating to mental health, and the social functions that can be implicated or connected around communication. The physical representations of the prints are separated into different styles, motifs, colours, material and language, to push the anxiety of information as a whole.
Print allows us to handle information, allows us to slow down our responses to the onslaught of information. Making media images by hand, involving manual labour, establishes a potential critical reappraisal of digital cognition, offering an off-centred outcome. There needs to be contemplation over time to view and unpack this exhaustion of information: I ask questions of how digital data can have physical correspondences, exploring the mashup between knowledge, expectations and conventions of digital representations of data and the redeployment of these through ink, repetition and fashion.
