Paintings in the Digital Age by Joshua Davidson
Joshua Davidson is a young British artist, currently working on his Master of Arts in Digital Practises at NSAD in England. Joshua is developing a Game Art project that comprises a game manual, a novel, and a series of paintings, originally created as a project for his Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts at Newcastle University in 2005.
Joshua writes: “Although I moved away from a direct visual gaming language I did continue to explore database narratives and interfaces specifically related to the use of a symbolic interface in my paintings”.
Paintings in the Digital Age by Joshua Davidson
“I have always been interested in the link between visuals and words. In my BA in Fine Art I explored paintings that made use of computer game interfaces and cinematic language. In my explanation of the work I tried to encourage my audience to investigate the ways we read visual images. However I was disappointed by the response, as I witnessed very little active investigation of the images in terms of their narrative content. I observed that people were less willing to fully explore the narratives of my static images than they would be to explore the story of a film or computer game for example.
During this Masters I have made use of technology to introduce collaborative elements to my work, believing that people would further explore narrative content if they could add to it. I also investigated how the integration of the internet into the world around us, could be utilised to tell a story. To this end I invented a system of delivering a situation dependent story. In this system the context that a person found themselves in would dictate how a story was delivered to them, be it through audio book, pictures and text, or film.
The work I have made on this course has lead to the creation of my Masters show. My images, like my work on situation dependent stories, explore notions of the integration of the internet as they are linked to a website. If people encounter the work outside the gallery (I am attempting to sell the images and display them in as many places as possible) they will only be able to check the contents of this website if they have a means of accessing the internet. The images also, like my BA work, contain references to a narrative of my own creation. This time however the images are more abstract. The story is hence referenced through the creation of a database of symbols that have been composited to make up the actuised images.” (Joshua Davidson)
LINK: Joshua Davidson's Original post
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
