André SC

I can’t help it, its back. My fascination with and compulsion to indulge in art. It is so hard to write about it. At least to me it is, so much harder than nearly anything else. When you are talking to someone in person it usually doesn’t take more than half a sentence to figure a workable strategy to suss out to where you and the person you are talking to can connect around art, or not. But just having a blank page in front of you… an in that blank page an indeterminable number of eyes from indeterminable different backgrounds, with their own agendas, stories and what not.

One tries to be authentic, and by trying negates virtually any potential of actually achieving that noble goal and instead end up even more desperately trying to avoid all the terrible post-post-modernist clichés and before long you are trying not to think of pink beetles or some such.

All of that swept aside, I’ll instead be trying to approach things a little bit more practically.

I enjoy the challenge of writing but am not under any illusions concerning the very real limits and deficiencies of my literary abilities. So if anyone is reading any of this I can only assume that they are in some way to some extent interested in my process and I suppose I’m arrogant and narcissistic enough that that the chance of that is enough for me to continue doing this here for now.

So I know I’m not much of a writer, but I never really wanted to be a writer. Sure at stages I walked around with delusions of writing a great sci-fi novel – ‘Nocturnicity’, even wrote two or three 1^st chapters. But that wasn’t about wanting to be a writer, it was about wanting to somehow manifest a phantom notion of a space, a future, a kind of experience and maybe even wanting to somehow fast-forward and focus on the beautiful and fascinating dance of emergence and technology. I’ve dabbled a bit with blogging and other socially networked services, but seldom with anything more than cursory experimentation.

Do I want to be an artist? Yes. Do I think I am an artist – that’s not so simple to answer, at least not honestly. It depends a lot, I suppose, on how you define artist (and when you ask me). For now I’m happy enough with calling what I’m busy with ‘artistic practice’ and to get on with it.

Since encountering the Salutogenic paradigm a few years ago in the context of Industrial Psycology and Human Capacity Development I’ve only become more impressed with the elegance, balance and remarkable relevance of it as an intellectual construct. It is wonderfully accessible – you could probably summarize it in about five sentences, yet it codifies and contextualises the entire spectrum from absolute practical detail to as lofty philosophical abstraction as my humble intellect can muster on my best days. So I intend to use it as a framework: comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness… comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness… comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness…If you’re going to hang around here you might as well get used to it.

Then there is the matter of sociotechnical systems theory, as I understand it a unifying perspective that acknowledges the simultaneous overlap, interaction and interdependence of respectively sociological and technological ‘sub-systems’ within a systems reality also containing environmental aspects.

Personally I have a introversion bias, which translates into a propensity for an inductive rather that deductive angle-of-attack on most things.

While I’ve done a fair bit of work I’ve not so far made much progress with taking it to market, and while it is the actual process of playing, constructing, composing formulating and refining self-contained pieces of art, doing this comes at some cost. And if the process is worth its own salt, at some point it has to engage with the wider world and hopefully start sustaining itself without being corrupted by that transaction. Is that possible? Regardless of the answer to that question, if there is one, I suppose I am convinced that there is in ways that matter, more value – certainly for this me – in the engagement and interaction than in pursuing some kind of isolated purity. Entropy and madness be that way.

So, how will we attack this.

Think about the socio-, the technical- and the systemic and environmental aspects of my practice of art.

Technically I’m more tan comfortable with the tools at my disposal at this point, some sensible software, a reasonably reliable and capable laptop, and behind it’s screen all of the internet’s crystallising reflection and refraction of most everything else, and a few other ods and ends here and there.

The social realm I find somewhat more intimidating and considerably more challenging. I’m not a natural networker, I’m the furthest thing you can imagine from a socialite. Yet I’ve been around quite a few blocks over the years and have learnt a few things, tricks and lessons along the way.

Systemically, well that is were the focus is at the moment for me. Given all of the above, what I’m doing here is creating a mapping of elements from which to orientate, reflect and order.

Until I’ve caught up with the backlog of pieces I feel are worthy of the effort I’ll be aiming to publish at least one piece per day at my art site, andresclements.com.

As and when time and resources allow I’ll streamline the cosmetics and presentation functionality of it as well. Here I’ll keep at least a weekly log of what I’m working on.

Make some sense of it, bring some order to it and ultimately manage it, or at least some of it successfully…