THE NATURE OF (IN) PERFECTION
The prefix post (as in postmodern) can sometimes suggest the redundancy of ideas that are surprisingly persistent despite the aesthetic changes that come with the new ideology/technology. Looks can be deceiving! Precision, perfection and beauty have a persistent presence in art, science and religion and a contemporary presence in digital technology, which carries these attribute/attitudes. Although the desire for and promise of progress can lead to image content that appears to supersede the preceding idiom, digital technology has a metaphysical character that has more in common with a pre-modern sensibility. Indeed, precision and perfection can be thought of as beautiful, much in the same way a scientific theory can be.
There is a case then for an active engagement with digital media, one that does not accept that technological progress involves the redundancy of older ideas and media; a refusal to be duped by the prefix post. This engagement needs to explore digital media through an acknowledgement that, like
science it has a longer history and can’t be neatly quarantined from an imperfect past.
About: Kevin Todd is an artist and designer originally from Ireland and living in Australia since the early 1980s. He is a graduate of Sydney College of the Arts and the Tasmanian School of Art and currently SeniorLecturer in computer-based art and design at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland.
Kevin has exhibited and undertaken residencies and projects internationally including with the Australian Antarctic Division, the Australian Museum and the Australian Pulp and Paper Institute. In 1995 he spent a year in Malaysia on an Asialink fellowship and he has also been a visiting professor at the State University of New York and a visiting scholar at New York University.
His art practice has two components; art-for-architecture where work is made/designed for a specific context and work for exhibition, which is generally more personal. A feature of his exhibition work has been a concern with limits of rationalism and the relationship between art, science and technology in Western culture. More information on Kevin’s work is available at; www.toddartist.com
