In effect, we are living in a state of perpetual remote control. As Carl Miller argues in his book The Death of the Gods (2018), algorithms have taken over many day-to-day procedures.
https://aeon.co/essays/do-you-know-your-stuff-the-ethics-of-the-material-world
Food for thought vis a vis pictopoiesis, its appropriateness and timeliness in our remote-controlled world. In pictopoiesis connection with origin, or source is maintained. The serial photo documentation of the painting not only shows that the first passage(s) of paint echo but how this is the case. By this, I intend throughout to try and make a form of truth-telling, though the facts of that truth are not obtained by logical analysis alone, there is a lot more to it. Just as there is a lot more to a poem than it seems, there is structure, and that structure goes back to, depends on, its fundamental building blocks.
I often alight on the black dot as a fundamental unit. This is because it has so much presence, holds so much meaning, yet it is also the smallest of things. An apostrophe for example, seen as a modified black dot, signifies the absence of that which would otherwise be present. The presence of absence can also be seen as the absence of presence, the assertion of the principle of negative/positive complementariness found in nature (for example in fundamental physics*). A black dot is also the infinitessimally small dot that, at the moment of the big bang was so dense that contained all that now exists in the universe, both positive and negative aspects.
*This morning on the radio I listened to a reading from Stephen Hawking’s last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, which came to mind as I wrote the last couple of sentences above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_Answers_to_the_Big_Questions
image: Inside The Black Dot, oil and graphite on paper JWR
