BINARY_ONTOLOGY.EXE
2011
Large Format Photography | Digital Photography | Painting | HD Videography
Medium Format Photography
32” x 26” Large Format C Print
A
BINARY ONTOLOGY
They say: Woman is Nature and Man is History.
We say: Reject Identity and Create Promiscuously.
Humanity inherently divides its world: splitting and pitting elements against each other in attempts at understanding and identification.
The Binary is a structure so fundamental to our nature that it gilds and stains nearly every aspect of our aesthetic existence,
serving as symbolic representations of power, sex, gender, and even the basis of digital computation technologies.
The Binary’s fundamentality does not make its conceptual hegemony a necessity.
Every Aesthetic is a Logic, and every Medium acts as an Aesthetic.
Dialectics as a form of Duality
There is a dialogue between the Binary and its role as the creation or construction of humanity, as well as the foundation of its scientific nature, which in itself is a dualism.
Ranging from the recurrent daily duel of light and shadow to the dichotomy of good and evil, duality is the innate construct through the scientific spectrum of the macrocosm, to imperceptible dark energy and dark matter versus perceivable phenomena, to the microcosm of light itself in its wave and particle notion. However, this repeated divergence does not just exist in the realm of concepts or science, but rather acts as a medium, much like an artistic medium, through which we perceive and create our subjective realities down to the individuation of cultural gender, sex, and sexuality.
Here, we have explored the merging boundaries of the masculine and feminine that permit us to experience the world symbolically and socio-culturally in a parallel fashion to the binary optical system that allows us to perceive the photo-electic effects of the art of Photography as opposed to its representational predecessor: Painting.
We investigated this schism through a series of polar thematics present in both the concepts/content and the process by which they were made. The positive unification of polar extremes and the notion of androgyny as the divine pinnacle of art and beauty was present in the aesthetics of Romanticism (Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schiller, Novalis, etc.), but has now been severed by the propagation of sociologically imposed constructs of sex, gender, and sexuality that only further push this divide and the bind they place on individuals by a “scientific” demarcation that then in turn determines the expression of their being.
Judith Butler, the American, post-structuralist philosopher, feminist, and gender theorist, is famous for proclaiming that gender, sex, and sexuality are inherently performative in nature. She draws primarily on Michel Foucault’s idea of “regulatory discourse” from his book Discipline and Punishment and describes performativity as “…that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” (Butler 1993).
Technologic advancements and the evolution of media now allow us to merge artistic mediums such as painting and photography to reach a type of progressive synthesis, ever attempting to extend the bounds of our limited capacity for originality and artistic comprehension.
Analogue Photography itself was a binary system based on the exposure of light, just like digital images now are simply binary code translated into a perceptible threshold of human vision.
“To express the infinitely many facts in finite compass, we bring in numbers as representational aids.
We do this despite the fact that what we are trying to get across has nothing to do with numbers and could be expressed without them were it not for the requirement of finitely based notation.”
—Steven Yablo, The Myth of the Seven