Project No. 1 - My World

    "Nothing can be further from the spirit of new technology than 'a place for everything and everything in its place'. You can't go home again" (McLuhan 16). 

    In my senior year of high school, I submitted my series for AP studio art as a set of ten large scale scribbles, technically, which were all taken from rough sketches I had done throughout the year. Using a tiny viewfinder, about a centimeter across, I mapped out each sketch finding my favorite views, photographing them, and gradually drawing them larger and larger until the gestures had become mapped into my hand and I could recreate them practically from memory. Editing each in their own way based on their personalities, my series was done, conjoined just by a loose process, devoid of any tangible themes. A kid even tried to insult me online by calling me "Mr. Charcoal Scribbler", so I changed my username to that. At the time I was very self-conscious about my art, particularly the absurdity of it. Was all that I was interested in doing just technically easy to create or think of? I still worry about this, but recently, in branching into new mediums, I think my anxieties about my place in art stem from the absurdity of the internet and technology's affects on the art world. I cannot see myself painting landscapes or realistic portraits, although I envy anyone who can, but I think I've found myself in a place where my art's purpose is the abscense of meaning and the abscense of explanation. I just want it to exist, I don't care how. 

   

     Over the past couple years I've had my Instagram account, @mr.charcoal_scribbler, where I post whatever nonsense images I make on my phone with editing apps I've had crash multiple times, doing things with them I don't think they were intended to do. I spam the account frequently with no context, which for a while I prided myself in my number of dropping followers, proving to myself I didn't care about the image itself, no matter how much I love each one, because it was the feed that was my focus. The constant stream of my nonsense images, flowing in spurts of congruency but ultimately having no real homogeny other than the absurdity of them. For me, it is the experience of following the account that is the medium. I openly advertise that anyone can use any image they want for their own projects for free, such as album covers (I personally think they'd be at home representing a noise music album), because I just want to keep the feed going. I could program a bot to keep posting them, and oneday an AI to make them for me. I would no longer be the artist, but I wouldn't care. I don't like being asked if this post is a tree, or if this one was a fence or a person because who cares if you figured out what it is, I just want you to see it, and if you're confused then I'm happy.