"Beapworks", Perth, Australia
"NewForms06", Vancouver, Canada
"Collision", Victoria, Canada
Between the idea The installation Concrescence enables participants to amass virtual objects onto their shadow, generating hybrid compositions of subjects and objects. |
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Video Documentation of Concresence in use Installation Technical Specifications Concrescence is a term used in biology and refers to the growing together of related parts or growth by the increase of the addition of particles. Similarly the term is also employed by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to designate the growing together of diverse elements into a newly evolving entity, that never fully congeals. Likewise, the installation Concrescence is a metaphor for the hybrid combinations of object and subject that are formed through a lifetime of intimate relations with objects: where do we start and where do they begin?.
Marx defined human social relations as constructed through relationships with commodities or “economic cell forms” 1. Likewise, the collective force of social, economic and personal interaction with these “economic cell forms” changes the identity and meaning of both objects and subjects. Accepting the surface and structural appearance of commodities requires faith in the inherent certainty of ‘a priori’ knowledge; perhaps other forms can take shape through the shadowy array of relations and networks2 that are always already a part of us.
Concrescence suggests that the relationships that we have with objects are far more mutable and intricate, inevitably involving many more materials, ideas and agencies than current notions of agency or subjectivity can explain. Just as the Elizabethans used to say: “Pursue your shadow and you will never catch it. Run from your shadow and it will follow you anywhere”. Suggests that making shadows contains a resemblance of the thing it shadows and allows us to retrieve information about objects' shapes, locations and movements relative to a surface. Nevertheless, shadows do not have a precise location in three-dimensional space: are they over the surface and touching it, or in the surface? Similarly, do our object relations ever completely congeal and can we entirely locate the complete gambit of connections that intrinsically bond us to ‘them’ and therefore to a wider global network of flows and modalities.
1 Marx, K. (1867/1976) Capital: volume 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 2 Network-as defined by Actor Network Theory is not a thing rather the recorded movement of a thing |
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Mark Cypher received a Master of Visual Arts in Sculpture, in 1995, from Sydney University, Australia, and is currently a Senior Lecturer and Program Chair for Multimedia at Murdoch University - Western Australia. Mark also began his PHD in 2004 researching Actor Network Theory in relation to interactive artworks. Cypher has participated in several international exhibitions, including “404” II International Festival of Electronic Arts, Rosario, Argentina, and “Biophilia” at the Perth International Arts Festival, Curtin University, Western Australia. Cypher has also exhibited work in various museums and galleries across Australia, including , the Western Australian Art Gallery, Sunshine Coast Gallery, Melbourne Contemporary art show and the Casula Powerhouse, Sydney. Cypher’s work is also held in several state and national collections such as the Art Gallery of Western Australia, ArtBank-Sydney, Casula Powerhouse-Sydney, Curtin University of Technology and University of Western Australia.