Paul Magee
Faulty instruments, the sea & the stars: a digital fine art practice
A digital fine art practice is at the nexus of some powerful dichotomies. The digital vs the analogue, the natural vs the artificial, the subjective vs the objective, the emotions vs reason, and art vs science among them. This research uncouples such polarities and confuses them. It confuses the theoretical with the practical, the rational with the irrational. It confuses art, science and technology. And it does so to advance a distinct approach to making sense.
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Paul Feyerabend portrays knowledge as an ever-expanding paratactic ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives. He argues that scientific knowledge does not advance in an entirely rational manner. His analysis of its history and methodologies leads him to advocate deviation and error, ambiguity, approximation and open interaction. He demonstrates that these methods and practices are essential in the construction of the ad-hoc hypotheses and future languages that are themselves essential to the further development of knowledge. Moreover, he asserts that these methods and practices are critical to human beings remaining free and happy agents.
The written component of this research takes such an anarchic epistemology and confuses it with an antiquity - that antiquity is of ancient Greece as understood by Feyerabend and Nietzsche, and as wilfully misunderstood by myself. This text begins by constructing a vaguely suspect chronicle of the trajectory and impact of aggressive rationality over the past two and a half millennia. At the same time it examines the instruments and practices of the dominant tradition within that chronicle. Those instruments and practices are then loosely misunderstood and misapplied to both an established art practice and an emerging writing practice.
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