Bonemap - Manifesto

Manifesto

Referencing Western Art’s narrative, Bonemap creates its own private iconography building layers of substance and meaning. Seeking to question the relationship between the body and the environment, Bonemap attempts to tackle theory and practice by investigating and researching the subtlety of experience through inventing environments. Placing and displacing artistic context into layers of meaning and space. It proposes to challenge cultural inscription and belief systems through universal themes, and further pursues interdisciplinary art form collaboration and activity by exploration into visual and performing arts as an integrated expression.

The methodology investigates the relationship between body and environment, partly through observing the macro environment (that larger than the human body) and the micro environment (smaller than the body). The macro and micro environments are a rich source of metaphor, both physical and metaphysical. The metaphysical relationships of the macro and micro environment, centred around a body in motion, is a metaphor for these universal themes. The relationship of movement within a particular environmental space is an area of research that provides insight into particular endemic and cultural differences. How much identity is placed into and upon the body through the environment both physically and sociologically ?

Western cultural beliefs reveal concerns of human domination over the environment and our own mortality, and consequently western art has explored the nature of our "reality" in relation to the environment. Decay is not frequently considered as a process intrinsically beautiful in itself. The natural intrinsic element of decay reinforces human vanity, and the need to attempt to create the enduring and define the beautiful, and rid society of the ephemeral and that perceived as unsightly. Exploring the significance of the environment challenges concepts of invention and humanity. One of the roles of Western Art for over 500 year, has been to replace physical space with virtual, illusionist and fantasy environments. This may manifest in duality's, parallel worlds that intensify human vanity and the relationship to its environment. Transgressing the romanticism of the landscape through abject ideas and images, reinforces the role of humanity on the planet.

The perpetual shifting of society’s belief systems increasingly challenges Western tradition. Order, structure and rationale, form the basis of Western thought. “Meaning” and “reality” join “truth” as problematic terms with the realisation that they are indeed relative. With the advent of virtual experience, as has happened throughout history, the notion of what is real is again being questioned. The distinction between virtual and real in our media saturated society becomes even more confusing, a development which has continued and intensified since we accepted the illusion of perspective, in the Renaissance, as reality.

The manufacturing of environments presents an opportunity to create virtual space, disembodied space, cultural space. Spacemaking raises questions of identity and identifying cultural formation; What is the relationship between cyber and organic? What is the nature of time, perspective, sensory in a computer interactive environment? Is a body the essence of meaning, a defining point for an environment, or merely a reference? Can computerisation of human experience contact the emotional or desensitise?

Invention and technology is an extension of the human. The virtual and the real juxtaposed explores the poetics of the cyber and the organic. We build upon existing environments, rather than digitally replacing them. Rendered environments provide other dimensions rather than declaring the organic obsolete, allowing the body to transform into seamless environments. This forms a rationale for the exploration of translated experience - landscape and body.

Bonemap focuses on the relationship of community and environment per the context of Postmodern reconstruction, rather than Modernism’s self-proclamation through art making, or Postmodern’s decontsructive “endgame” spiral. As art embraces the millennium, the emphasis should turn from individualism, self promotion and economic rationalism, to creating responsibly, caring for the worlds’ limited resources, and thinking of the relationship between community and the environment.

Looking at the relationship between humanity and the environment as art, creates an ecological perspective that moves away from the traditional mode of art-for-art sake, inherent in modernist practice, and the postmodernist blues of deconstruction. This paradigm founds a ‘re-enchantment’ of art based on reconstruction, responsible art making, and relationships, rather than deconstruction, individualism and objects. This perspective effectively responds to, but does not replace, the aesthetic model. Redressing meaning and purpose provides a context for socially and morally sensitive art. For the resolution of Bonemap to occur, the redefining of art and culture need to originate from changes individuals instil on a personal level.

media artists environment landscape performance
files image sound manifesto sponsors venues links

search this site: