Interview with Sarah Younan, 2014
Will Kendrick 12.06.2014
A printed screenshot of a photograph of a painting (…)
The Mona Lisa was always a virtual experience anyway.
Trevor H. Smith1
Will Kendrick grew up in the Northern sea side town of Blackpool and is convinced the city left him with ‘an obsession with colour and kitsch’; the ‘neon lights, amusement arcades and nightclubs’ of Blackpool have informed his aesthetic vision. Kendrick moved to Bath for his BA in Fine Art, during which he began using resin to cast sculptures. Kendrick used copying processes to reproduce and alter found objects; his process involved pouring resin over shop mannequins, letting it dry and removing the brightly coloured resin form.
Today, Kendrick’s main source of found ‘objects’ and images is the Internet; ‘I use Google as a palette,’ he explains. Kendrick edits, layers and collages images, 3D models, films and Gifs found online to produce new visual material. ‘A lot of my work is about copying and reproduction,’ he explains ‘in art education there is often a push for originality, but copying has always been a way of learning, and most art is derived from copies’. Kendrick sources his visual material from online 3D model repositories2, from YouTube and through Google. The resulting collages, prints, web-based pieces and installations ‘blur the boundaries between disciplines, eras and media, referencing art history along with contemporary cinema in a way that any contemporary eye can immediately relate to’ (Katie Tsouros). Through projects such as his collaborative practice MadeScapes3 and curatorial project Home-Platform4, Kendrick experiments with art that moves between the digital and the physical realm and curates collaborative exhibitions that take place partly in the real world, partly online; ‘sometimes the browser is my canvas, but other work needs the gallery space’.
Kendrick feels privileged to witness the ‘rise’ of digital technologies and looks towards the progression of digital technologies with a lot of optimism; ‘it is frustrating that I have a lifespan and can’t see everything that will happen in the future.’ Kendrick remembers playing Atari and Commodore 64 games as a boy. Today, it is hard to think about a world without computers, smartphones, tablets and touchscreens. Kendrick recalls the fast commodification of digital technologies; ‘everything moved so quickly, there was this huge jump in technology’. ‘We are the crossover generation,’ he explains, ‘Wikipedia pages, images on the Internet, these are the artefacts we will leave behind, the whole thing is our legacy’. On the Web, it can seem virtually impossible to erase anything entirely, much to the dismay of people who regret posting misjudged status updates or uploading compromising images online. However this sense of permanence can be deceiving; rapid changes in the use of computer software and file formats mean that much digital information becomes lost or unreadable after some time. For example, artwork by Andy Warhol made on an Amiga computer in 1985 was recently re-discovered after it had been hidden away on defunct floppy disks for close to 30 years5. Researchers had to ‘dig up’ the lost images and convert them into useable file formats. Kendrick believes, that this form of ‘digital archaeology’ will become an important part of historical research in the future. ‘The digging really begins when you look into the computer memory,’ Kendrick explains, ‘people will be unearthing the digital’.
Collaboration is an integral part of Kendrick’s practice; he uploads his work online and shares it as open-source data; ‘I have no problem with someone taking my work and making new stuff from it’. Kendrick sees this sharing and recontextualising of visual materials as a positive thing, a new way in which art is growing organically and collaboratively; ‘I see it as a progression,’ he explains, ‘we are building on what is already there, and creating work on which the next generation will build. Art is an evolutionary progress, rather than a sequence of divine inspired moments.’ Kendrick has recently used 3D models of museum objects, accessed via Oliver Laric’s Lincoln 3D Scans website6 in his work. Instead of looking at the past with a sense of nostalgia Kendrick has used these 3D models to ‘re-imagine, re-contextualize and re-connect’ artefacts from the past, collating them with contemporary material. Through this process of appropriation and re-appropriation old meanings are lost and new meanings begin to emerge. ‘I am clinging to the past in a very progressive way,’ Kendrick explains, ‘pushing it forward, rather than dragging it behind’. He sees the 3D models ‘like tourist objects’; they retain only some of their original connotations as they are carried forward towards new contexts. Kendrick did not look into the historical connections of the Lincoln 3D scans he used. He is more interested in their historical appearance, than in their actual histories.
To Kendrick the Internet is a ‘sea of stuff’, a repository that traditional institutions like libraries, museums and galleries have to keep abreast with. He sees no clear distinction between material and physical repositories; ‘in the future I think people will switch between both realms quite naturally, there will hardly be any distinction, technologies like the oculus rift are already moving in this direction’. Kendrick does not see this as a threat to traditional institutions, such as museums ‘in the end no-one wants to stare at a screen all day, museums are social physical spaces and we will always need such spaces’. Museums have changed and progressed continuously since their conception. Today, digital technologies present a new challenge. ‘People want to curate their own experiences more,’ Kendrick argues, ‘they are not looking for linear experiences.’ 3D models of museum artefacts can potentially open up museum collections; ‘I feel like I can hold them (the museum objects) and play with them,’ Kendrick relates, ‘and that’s never happened before, they have always been behind glass.’
Kendrick argues that museums now have a chance to contribute material towards the ‘digital evolution’ of art. Through 3D digitization collections of artefacts from the past can continue to inspire today’s artists. ‘This is the thing I love about art,’ Kendrick explains, ‘you can revive the dead branches, reconnect the forgotten to something new’.
1 'Bending Light', Trevor H. Smith http://home-platform.com/bendinglight.html
2
Today mainly online repositories dedicated to the sharing of digital 3D models exist. They contain born-digital objects (see for example http://www.blender-models.com/ ) and digital models of real-life objects (see http://www.123dapp.com/Gallery/content/all ). Both accessed 13.06.2014.
3
See http://madescapes.com/ , accessed 13.06.2014.
4http://home-platform.com/
5
See http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/24/us/andy-warhol-lost-art/ , accessed 13.06.2014.
6
See http://lincoln3dscans.co.uk/ , accessed 13.06.2014.