Pwnd

This work began as an interest in merging two opposing abstract techniques; a hand manipulated process and a digital manipulated process. The intention being to play the abstracted digital pixelation off the more chaotic and expressive hand manipulation. The digitally manipulated imagery comes from Call of Duty: Black Ops, a massively popular first person shooter game. This inclusion of the digital, or false, body into a medium based so much in reality is the underpinning of this project. The interest is in the role video games are playing in helping to bring about the seemingly inevitable notion of ‘the singularity’. That is, a time when we as mankind create our own end through artificial intelligence, as it will quickly surpass our own and be left with no need for us. The enlarged faces, despite the pixelation, became hauntingly real and powerful, also the hand manipulation began to speak not only to the importance of the gesture and hand of the artist but to the violence associated with this war-related imagery and the bleak future of ‘the singularity’, were we may become hunted and killed for game.