‘METONYMICAL SUBTEXT’

“We are entering a virtual new world, in which distinctions of reality and fantasy will cease to matter, as more of us will tend to spend time in the virtual environments or cyberspace.

The intangible, a maya of illusion, will be eminent. Information, memories, thoughts, feelings & language are clouds, that long after our physical disappearance, will continue to oat around an ether world of binary code.

The evolution of man is as incomprehensible as the complexity of his DNA. The devolution of knowledge from books, the written text transiting to the language of the computer or the segueing of art into the digital arena, are all manifests herein.

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than their own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information from the billions of bits and bytes.

In the opinion of Edward Castronova, author of ‘Synthetic worlds’, such electronic experiences are a profound indicator of where the world is heading. That a growing number of people around the world will be spending more and more time playing multiplayer games in virtual reality both as a form of escape and as a search for meaning. He says, ”it might be that even games become deeply personal artefacts – more like dreams.“

The current body of work seeks to coalesce the past with the future. Fusing the painted with the printed or interactivity of the computer with physical act of painting. I am attempting to bridge the expression, while stating that one can’t survive without the other, asserting that, mediums may change but the message always conveys.”

– Jaideep Mehrotra 2011