Title
Creation Date
2016
Preview
Medium
glaze on stoneware over steel
Description
Dimensions: irregular dimensions
Rights
© Thomas Gregory Finnegan, 2016. Photo credit: Allison Corona.
Keywords
machines, abject, tribute, multimedia, surveillance, slip cast
Artist Statement
We live in a time when all of our interactions are mediated by computer type devices. My generation is the last in this country to know about life before the advent of Facebook, videogames, cell phones, and the personal computer. To be unreachable is now an affront to your social network. Typing, editing, and self-publishing have become life skills. There is a huge burden for humans to adapt to this radically changing social construction and be able to blend with technology. My interest is in this place of convergence between human behavior and human technology. In this body of work, I am exploring the relationship humans have with the computerized and mechanized.
Conduit is a bronze, gestural monument to our ability to bend and shape electrical forces to into ever-more refined states that allow us to text message and check our Facebook status.
The videogame controller is the key into a society of gamers and hackers that live on-line in a virtual world moderated by internet service providers and game developers. It’s a strange world made mostly of boys and young men where self-aggrandizing machismo mixes with fantasies of sex and violence. Fleshpad is a game controller recast in lifelike silicon to blur the line between body and technology.
Sentinel stands and watches over the scene. It is a monolith of plastic, wood, aluminum and electronics that hyperventilates at the approach of viewers. As an ambiguous and ominous piece of technology, this object reminds us that we don’t know what many of our technological tools actually do or who monitors the data they collect.
Coffee Date is concerned with the isolating side-effects of technologies that purport to connect people across the world, while at the same time making us more reliant on machines to act as intermediaries in our relationships. Two industrial robotic arms are recast in stoneware and share a cup of coffee out of paper cups.