Polishing the silverware in utopia.

Digital ideology; The separation of a view of the world from the reality of empirical circumstances. Gestalt does not here refer exclusively to visual phenomenon occurring in relation to 2-dimensional picture planes. Gestalt is the action of sight and sense bringing about a coherent environment ‘in mind’.

The digital influences on our contemporary psyches exist within increasingly complex and convincing layers. Examining this phenomenon in terms of ideological influence is as pressing as ideology itself. The tools of image production gain exponential complexity, while the basic principles of ideology and image remain rooted in familiar soil. Painting and sculpture remain environments of investigation founded in intangible experience and connect directly to the materiality of production. This is a necessary connection; it is a tether to the physical environment. Where the work of coherent cultural analysis is neglected, the tropes of 21st-century ideological influence, even those in the service of environmental preservation, remain disconnected with the necessities of physical imperatives. The frames of lens and screen generate overwhelming anxiety to which the strongest natural responses are avoidance or paralysed.

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