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Art is an abstraction of the waking world, says Android Jones, the digital artist. As he explores his consciousness and finds visuals for his fantasies, he dwells between love and fear to create a body of work that is “One unending love story”. Excerpts from a conversation where he talks about his art, ideas and everything in between.
CG: How do you perceive the relationship between art, artist and the world they are in?
Android. Human creativity is one of the most precious resources of our consciousness. As we look back at history, great art has always been the fulcrum point from where we measure the value of our humanity and the crucible of our evolution. Art helps us relate and reflect on the relationship between the invisible world of our consciousness and our dreams and makes it visible for the physical world. It acts as a bridge between the inner and outer realities that can share and evolve collectively.
CG: How much of this connection exists in your art? How has it evolved over the years?
Android. The creative process is an expression of my love of life and a service to my friends, family, and community. Fear of boredom or lost opportunities of using the gift of creativity keeps me active. This friction between love and fear always inspires my art. I am attracted to images that carry a spiritual or emotional significance to create a landscape that the viewer can form their own narrative around.
CG: Where do these images come from? And how do you make them coexist in your artworks?
Android. Instincts guide the selection of images. I am naturally drawn to certain shapes, colours and patterns. It could be an arrangement of clouds, a unique tapestry on the wall, anything. Often, I look for the visual-fractal relationships between objects. For example, the spirals of the milky way or of a hurricane reflect the spiral seed pattern of a sunflower. I can look at the branches of a tree in wintertime and see the ventricles in the human heart. At the core of our neocortex is one of the most advanced shape and pattern recognition technologies. It’s the duty of an artist to take advantage of this gift of recognising the intrinsic relationship between all things. And art is an amazing medium through which one can express this concept.
CG: But do your viewers relate to the connection in the same way you do?
Android. My artworks are not the stuff of galleries or museums, but the interior of human imagination. The works I create are only crude snapshots of other realities, digital seeds that take root through the rich soil of the neocortex in order to inspire dreams, visions, ideas and emotional connections through the viewer. Art is really a visual crystallisation of consciousness. So, the more developed ideas you have, the clearer that idea comes out in the artwork.
CG: Isn’t it also a mastery of technology that complements the idea?
Android. Human evolution is predicated on the advancement of our mastery of tools. All tools are first born in our imagination. They are essentially only a physical extension of our imagination. The advancement of our creative tools marks a furthering of our creative evolution. It gets really exciting when the tools we use expand our ability to imagine greater things and then give birth to further new techniques and new tools.
CG: What role do technology and tools play in your art?
Android. I often dream in the current software that I am using. I don’t dream in brushes or paint anymore. My consciousness has completely embraced my technological counterparts. As we approach a technological singularity, digital hardware and software have the potential of advancing at a rate where it may be impossible for one mind to keep pace. This is going to open up new horizons of potential that no artist has ever anticipated.
CG: Where do you see digital or concept art moving?
Android. I believe that our thoughts and our dreams are electrochemical impulses. I see digital art moving into a space that will eventually bypass our meat fleshy extremities, Artists in the future will be able to ‘paint’ visual images, thoughts, dreams, and emotions directly into each other’s consciousness.
CG: Does that imply live art experiences? How is it different from the traditional sit-and-draw ones?
Android. One of the significant differences is when making an image I am encoding my time and my life in a series of strokes and pixels. People ‘experience’ it but it’s a much more isolated series of moments. As an ‘experience designer’ you are not making paintings of people, instead you are making people your paintings. In a studio setting, you have total control over temperature, lighting, sound, silence, atmosphere etc. In live performances, I have to completely surrender control of all of these factors. My solitude is then replaced with thousands of other people. Human transformation is the final creation.
CG: With Digital art going through such a dynamic phase right now, what advice will you give to aspiring digital artists?
Android. It is important for all aspiring digital artists to recognize how profound the opportunities are in this moment of time. Never before have artists had access to such a plethora of information and tools. The future of art is not digital painting, but how we develop a creative relationship with the emerging tools around us. The boundaries are begging to crumble around us.
Published in Issue 14
We dedicated this issue to Digital Art where we explored the connection between our dreams and imagination and how the flexibility of technology can be used to document that. In his exclusive article, Android Jones explains the broader perspective of digital art. Featuring Ankur Singh Patar, Archan Nair, Harshvardhan Kadam and Aamina Shazi Arora, every article discusses how each of them has an individual way of working and yet they all look at life beyond the obvious to appreciate it’s beauty.
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