The Vision of the Absurd is the culmination of five years research into how my fine art practice creates an affective encounter that can be more effectively and dynamically shared in the public realm. Central to this process was my early intuition that art has an excess that delivers understanding outside of conceptual cognition. Which is to say, art operates through material and aesthetic registers that need to be given space to reconnect audiences with the artist in shared experiences of discovery. The subsequent development of a series of aesthetic machines were all concerned with promoting these other modes of thought (Whitehead, 1968) and working with concepts that can become abstract material for expression (Zepke 2010). My initial sense that the non-linear causality of the absurd could move my art towards a more affective frequency was further shaped by my encounter with non-representational theory (Thrift, 2007) and put into practice in my role as the co-curator of Sensorium/Affect and Social media conferences at UEL between 2016-19.
Furthermore, by experiencing artists who similarly placed digital moving images within a structure of haptic material vitality, such as Pipilotti Rist and Laure Prouvost, I found that the concept of the abstract machine (Zepke 2010) allowed my practice to radiate outwards as a kind of an aesthetic ontological experience (Debaise 2017). This ontological perspective becomes a significant means of exploring non-hierarchical smooth spaces (Deleuze and Guattari 2003) which activate a sense of my various creative capacities and form an absurd woven tapestry that celebrates creative abundance and destabilises the conceptual nature of interdisciplinary tactics
