PROJECTS

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A mirrored version of the floating sculpture, TRUTH LOST AT SEA floating on Martha’s Vineyard Sound.

In late 2001, we lived in Concord, Massachusetts. In the shadow of the recent destruction from what has become known as September 11th, we had been planning a major trip with our two children, aged 13 and 8 at the time. We took our two children out of school, and began a circumnavigation of the Earth, as a way to do two things: One, was to reassure them that the larger world was a place to be discovered, and secondly, despite rising terrorism we needed a way to engage the next generation to know that the world was not to be feared or scorned.

18 countries and 70,000 miles later we were a bit weary of traveling, but a tighter family unit, and the comfort of learning about new places was firmly implanted.

While on trek in Northern Thailand, we met a remarkable woman Lek, who was helping to resuscitate the ELEPHANT population. The Elephant had long been a symbol of her country, so her efforts were based on conservation, the way Dr. Jane Goodall did with the apes. There we also met KINGMAI, an orphaned baby elephant. He was orphaned because a mahoot, a traditional elephant handler, had cruelly blinded the calf’s mother forcing KINGMAI to run away. Ultimately the calf would get wedged in between two trees until Lek rescued him and brought him to her sanctuary where she and others nursed him back to health.

BABY ELEPHANTS NEVER FORGET reflects that experience and the importance of direct kindness and empathy for the animal world.

From My 2002 sketchbook in Thailand

TRUTH LOST AT SEA (MIRROR VERSION) afloat in Martha’s Vineyard Sound (Composited image)

TRUTH LOST AT SEA is the largest of the TRUTH PROJECT sculptures in the series. It is to be fabricated from aluminum with an irregular hole pattern on the surface to let the internal LED light be seen from a distance and to allow wind to pass through the sculpture to reduce wind load. A companion vessel, likely a small tugboat, will accompany the sculpture around and position it into each of the locations it appears in.

TRUTH PROJECT is a series of artistic explorations into the language associated with the word “truth”. The artworks range from the nano scale (actually carving the word on the point of a pin at 2microns) to the large-scale water-going artwork TRUTH LOST AT SEA, which will have an east coast multi-city tour of waterways and highways as an alternative venue for public exhibition.

“The path to visually present a complex concept like truth is a process.  I began the project as an artistic response to the mythical idea of “alternative facts” .

TRUTH LOST AT SEA afloat on Manhattan’s EAST RIVER [AI moving image]

This is the ONLY FUZZY TRUTH I know of.

My sculpture, FUZZY TRUTH is intended as a satirical and provocative artwork. My goal is to illustrate how Truth, as a foundational concept of democracy, has increasingly lost its legitimacy via bot-driven algorithms that strive for viral exposure.  Welcome to disinfoworld.

On October 17, 2005, Stephen Colbert introduced the term “truthiness” on the premiere of The Colbert Report, defining it as the preference for ideas one wishes to be true over established facts.

In today’s interconnected world, technology has accelerated a destructive tendency to spread disinformation,<–more–>prioritizing profitability of viewership over facts. Orwell’s 1948 book 1984 foresaw this fragility, and in the present time, amid constant lies and “alternative facts,” the battle for discernible truth has evolved beyond human capacity, self-generated instead on networked computers to offer the seemingly real.

Since the 45th President’s term, the manipulation of what represents the “Truth” has become victim to a twenty-first century version of an Orwellian reality, highlighting the vulnerability and complexity of  observable proof.

Motivated by this massive distortion, I began TRUTH PROJECT, exploring colloquial expressions of truth. And while I use computer algorithms to ideate and create imagery as an artist, for TRUTH PROJECT I fabricate objects and drawings– both large and small– to exist firmly in a non-computer reality. WHIPS

As noted by historian Yuval Noah Hariri, the critical nature of “intersubjective reality” (a shared understanding of the world that is created through communication, cultural norms, and social agreement) is deeply at risk. Hariri warns that without shared realities there is a great potential for catastrophic outcomes.