KAY SLATER @kayslater-blog1 - Tumblr Blog

kay slater, 2016

relativity + relatability: exhibition essay

Interactivity, as defined as a dialogue or connection bridging a gap between two beings, isn’t always palpable or tangible--it isn’t always visible to the eye or smooth to the touch. Usually it can be displayed through a forced action by the viewer, a movement or button pressed by the patron to change the current state of the work. However, interactivity is not confined to a video game’s joystick or a hand on a sensor. Interactivity, as defined in this exhibition, is the bridge between the tangible and the intangible--it is the avenue in which one is able to reach the next level of understanding, a road that allows a glimpse into the artist’s personal realm, showcasing a newfound sense of reality.

The artist’s ability to interact with another world, another level, and another realm opens up newfound critical and contextual routes to explore. The abstractions between one dynamic of the artist’s work and its succeeding relativity enables understanding by the viewer, and opens up a contextual world previously disabled or unexplored. An archive, a collection of histories--whether it be a linear grouping of information or the addition and collaboration of another’s artistry--, paired with the visual artist’s work gives breadth to said work. The viewer’s understanding of the work’s past and present history is precisely what this exhibition works to display--how does that understanding translate to a sense of interactivity? How does that connection and collaboration lend itself to a definition of interactivity?

The media showcased in this exhibition directly emulates a creation of another: whether that be a kinetic, ephemeral transformation of a room, like in Amanda Konkol’s “To Catch a Glimpse of the Waning Sun,” this media--among others--performs an emerging, experimental space responsibly delegated to realm-creation and to the visual connection between artist and viewer. In order to manifest Relativity + Relatability, the exhibition is actually placed in a physical space. Enabling a space for new and experimental media such as these works is imperative to giving these works’ own realms a reality.

The majority of this exhibition is multidimensional, experimental, and zeros-in on pushing normative boundaries of traditional notions of media and of the typical art historical canon. These artists and scholars demonstrate, in and of themselves, an interactive, emerging curriculum of spectacular creation, displaying post-humanistic, scientifically fictional worlds that don’t seem very different than the imaginations of our own human, non-fictional world.

#writing #curatorial #exhibition #psuedo exhibition #exhibition essay

confessions of an animatronic

There has always been something there--something bolstering at the fringes of my eyes, a sense of abnormalcy, a flirtation with the unreal. Dry skin, cracked spine, and grey eyes intact, I set out every inch of myself to press, to push, to slip. I press the ON button and I sit up straight, in my bed, letting the sparks find my irises. My world is silver, a shiny grey.

I have known since childhood that there was something wrong with me, a consistent lapse in judgement, disinterest in the bodies that floundered and flustered around me--a movement as toppled and unorganized as my vertebrae. Obsession with obscure indie pop and character roleplaying on forum boards eventually drew me to become an artist--or, at least, a writer, in some sense of the word. I cross boundaries too often and no one tells me where to go, or they push too hard (my mother, a Leo, child of a Capricorn and a Taurus, in the for-sure sense of the word). I always tell my friends that I’m rehearsing for real life. Being an Aquarius is the only way I know how to explain myself. No one taught me how to be a person. Mom always said that she knew I was brilliant because I mastered puzzles in seconds as an infant. That was the beginning. I don’t think of myself as being a Steve-Jobs-bullshit-but-sort-of-not-genius, but, does hyperawareness count?

I am unable to stand still, yet am restricted by an inversion forcing my legs inward and my heart out. My spine curves to a practical 37.5 degrees, at one point, but probably still. The skin on my hands is dry, almost cracked, bruising on my knee and dark (non-blonde) hair newly growing on my calves. My skin has bumps, blemishes, bruises, all natural, all inherited, all genetic. My nails are strong. My ankle cracks at every interval of step. It’s easy to see the veins underneath my skin, to see my fingers turn blue when I’m cold. I think that’s how I know I’m not of a ‘particular normalcy’--my body always looks like it’s about to crack in half and die. I feel like I’m the step below being telepathic. I have a feeling my body has been and is deteriorating from the inside out as I learned how to walk and how to breathe. This should not be misconstrued to mean that I don’t want to have a human body in and of itself (I have an acute obsession with physiology and the sex appeal of fictional serial killer Dexter Morgan’s ease with flesh, so, I like bodies, and Dexter); some of us have to work with what we have. Confronting internal pain is my practice.

I think mathematics is bullshit. I think knowing something for certain is so prone to problems and so prone to bullshit. It’s all bullshit. This is the 18-year-old who learned introductory philosophy through The Matrix and The Dark Knight talking, but I am now 20-years-old, and I know it’s all bullshit. The skin that barely drapes over my thin bones and thick muscle is more real than numbers in a system could ever be. The creaks and the cracks and the pops and the breaks are more actual than numbers. All I want to study is why humans give so much of a shit. Machine gave us a platform to adventure, to be better, to explore, beyond the humanistic. My skin is machine, rusting inside after being drowned but stainless steel facing out, towards you, with flesh. Don’t confuse the two.

There is a moment in which I can feel the skin on my hands, the scales that reminds me that leather is constricting and inflexible. Do you know what it’s like to keep a routine? Does the body actually care about you? Do you ever snap your neck and wonder how you’re still moving?

#artiststatement