Notes on Paintings on Computer Circuit Boards

Alexis Hunter

Working inside the silent blackness of a sinister night in the country. Quiet as a moonless ghosting a desire grows, a conscious need to dissipate yet control the structural formality of a framework already designed to dispel anarchy. There is empathy to an order in those synthetic spectral labyrinths, weaving through ethereal technical umbilical cords of a computer Motherboard. Within the sparkling magical surface maze a supernatural image appears in the pattern, a mirage of shapes entwining a possible understanding of what it is to be human in a digital existence. Policing the cyberwaves of the unconscious and dragging the simple idiocy of the Digital Revolution back through the tangles of spiritualism, back through Pagan ritual, battles between Good and Evil, lust and duty, sin and innocence.

The subject painted can be depictions of the counting of Geomancy, the layers of Kabalistic achievement, the Evil Eye of Witchcraft dispelled for the Medieval Pagan. A Judeo-Christian allegory defines new lusts as coiling serpents from Hell are covered with the crude communication psychosis of Cyberland. In Internetland sex is only display, (no stroking) as cold as the stars, the throb of more gold for the depicted bodies the only relief. Between the shiny sharp circuitry points and digital diagrams, these spiritual images mollify a fear of the unknown, a miasma of the void.

The image, sometimes a fanciful chimera, tarot card queen or long lost Goddess, is caught inside between this real object and the new virtual world. Every meaning has no meaning in our Postmodern spiritual vacuum as images and words can mimic higher thought and base curiosity in the same instant. I give you an amulet, a talisman, as you are now, a computed entity in a computed process, this digital system now living as we do, alive within us, now all universal travellers in space and time.

Alexis Hunter 2005