GENERATIVE ASSEMBLAGE IN MY WORK:
Assemblage is the lodestone of my practice. I use its generative nature to explore coherence and form beyond the logic and limitations of my own subjectivity.
My work begins with an attraction to the partial. In the fragmentary, I find an analogue for my own perspective and an instrument of allusion that suggests unseen wholes, intricate orders, and vast arcing narratives.
In my practice, I collect fragments and scatter them arbitrarily. The scattering is an extension, an expansion of the discrete part into a network. I notice resonance between the nodes of this network and interact with their interactions; adding, subtracting, adjusting. Boundaries leak, overlap, dissolve. Overlapping, interleaving, and nesting become recursion, superimposition, and concrescence. My network of fragments becomes a processual nexus.
From the interactions between entangled, heterogenous parts, a new whole emerges with surprising properties that cannot be understood by examining it’s individual components.
My assemblage is an integrative hierarchy wherein the whole exerts a top-down influence upon its constituent parts while being influenced by these parts from the bottom-up, simultaneously. As information is created by this process, the assemblage’s initial fragmented nature, as well as its degrees of freedom and constraints, evolve into a more integrated development, a generative process. The oscillations between the whole and the parts give the assemblage its generative nature.
I imagine this phenomenon as a flicker, a positive feedback circuit, a complex dynamics. Figure and ground merge into a mutualism of form and contra-form. Under the force of this looping tension, the work acts upon itself. In a state of integrative hierarchy, assemblage reveals its agency and emerges as a uncanny collaborator.
My work begins with an attraction to the partial. In the fragmentary, I find an analogue for my own perspective and an instrument of allusion that suggests unseen wholes, intricate orders, and vast arcing narratives.
In my practice, I collect fragments and scatter them arbitrarily. The scattering is an extension, an expansion of the discrete part into a network. I notice resonance between the nodes of this network and interact with their interactions; adding, subtracting, adjusting. Boundaries leak, overlap, dissolve. Overlapping, interleaving, and nesting become recursion, superimposition, and concrescence. My network of fragments becomes a processual nexus.
From the interactions between entangled, heterogenous parts, a new whole emerges with surprising properties that cannot be understood by examining it’s individual components.
My assemblage is an integrative hierarchy wherein the whole exerts a top-down influence upon its constituent parts while being influenced by these parts from the bottom-up, simultaneously. As information is created by this process, the assemblage’s initial fragmented nature, as well as its degrees of freedom and constraints, evolve into a more integrated development, a generative process. The oscillations between the whole and the parts give the assemblage its generative nature.
I imagine this phenomenon as a flicker, a positive feedback circuit, a complex dynamics. Figure and ground merge into a mutualism of form and contra-form. Under the force of this looping tension, the work acts upon itself. In a state of integrative hierarchy, assemblage reveals its agency and emerges as a uncanny collaborator.
The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness.
The aggregate voice is a defiant prayer.
But the spirit of the whole is processional.
The only thing that would not merge away into something else
would be that besides which there is nothing else
(Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned)
The aggregate voice is a defiant prayer.
But the spirit of the whole is processional.
The only thing that would not merge away into something else
would be that besides which there is nothing else
(Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned)
© TURNER WILLIAMS JR. 2023