Macroscope series (Set 1). Mixed-Media/Digital/Collage. Archival digital prints on heavy watercolor paper.
Artist Statement for Marcoscope Series.
In his book The Medium is the Massage Marshall McLuhan says…
“All media are extensions of some human facility —
psychic or physical.
The wheel is an extension of the foot,
the book is an extension of the eye,
clothing, an extension of the skin,
electric circuitry, an extension of central nervous system. . . .
The extension of any sense alerts the way we think and act —
the way we perceive the world.” 1
We understand our physical world through our senses. Our bodies collect experiences to shape how we understand the world around us. Media, technology and innovation extend our senses, propelling us forward in knowledge and understanding beyond the limits of what our sense could discern on their own. The metaphor of extension mythologizes and promotes what we mostly celebrate as “progress” — a never-ending journey of expansion in human achievement.
But what if the metaphor was inverted to see our senses, and our human attempts to extend our senses, as ultimately limited? This new way of conceptualizing frames our five human senses as a set of walls — a container obscuring realities beyond what even our enhanced physical senses can grasp on their own. My work for this exhibit is an exploration of this opposing metaphor of limitation.
This view of our senses is not a contrarian or reactionary response to technological progress. Rather, it is a way to foster new contexts, questions and possibilities that emerge as we consider our limited perception of reality inside the container of our physical senses.
I titled each of the five walled forms/images in this body of work, “Macroscopes.” Unlike a microscope that extends inward into the physical world, a Macroscope expands outward to investigate a reality not confined within the cell of our senses.
Within the container of our senses, we create our world of culture. To visually represent this, the walls of every macroscope are lined with cultural fragments. I derived these from a process I developed in which I visually interpret, deconstruct or reconstruct “trending images” that are found on various social media websites. The work from this process is a way to gauge, or portray a cross-section of, our collective immediate interests, concerns or amusements and give them visual form.
The containing structure of each Macroscope varies in shape with some walls/senses being larger or more prominent than others. In addition, some Macroscopes are more porous, reflecting various degrees of openness/resistance to a transcendent reality beyond the container of our senses.
Each Macroscope is meant to be an invitation to the viewer to see him or herself in a cell that is physically limited but imaginatively expansive. As Wendell Berry writes, “Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements, but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.”2 By understanding our senses as limited, we, ironically, can imagine a transcendent reality that could exist outside our limitations. This reality can penetrate and radiate within the human container if we are willing and open to discern it and, most importantly, by relying on one of our most intrinsically human senses — imagine it.
1. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage, des. Quentin Fiore, comp. Jerome Agel (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 26-41.
2. Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2008, 35-42.
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