American artist Shawn Smith is inspired by nature as depicted in 1980s videogames. But his 8-bit inspired sculptures are not just a game, says Smith in an interview with Tech Sunday.
Tech Sunday: At first glance, your sculptures are playful – yet how sober are they?
Shawn Smith: I think there is something sobering about seeing nature reconstructed with details missing and becoming deconstructed into smaller components. My work asks the viewer to look a little closer as to how our progress is affecting the natural world – and that’s a very sobering thought.
TS: You were born in a decade where the strict delineation between digital and real began to loosen up. When did this start influencing your artistic output?
SS: I started to become more and more aware of this greying over while I was in graduate school.
TS: How great is the influence of 1980s videogames on your art?
SS: Videogames from the 1980s were a big influence on this body of work – I even used to joke that I was born in the year of Pong, in 1972. I grew up with the Atari 2600 and eventually graduated my way up to a Commodore 64. I don’t think the early imagery was more than just fun chasing the pixel. It wasn’t until my last year of graduate school in 2005 that I began to go back and look at how objects, particularly those of nature, were depicted in 1980s videogames. For the really early 1980s games, there is an economy of representation in the development of an object’s identity. In graduate school, I found myself becoming more and more interested in how nature was constructed using pixels as well as the context for these objects provided by the game play. For example, in the game Pitfall, I love the way that the campfire and scorpion are developed as objects that gives a sense of place as well as a sense of danger.
TS: If you had to upgrade from 8-bit, what would your sculptures look like?
SS: I think the objects would stay the same size but the pixels would become smaller. For example, the pixels would change from 1cm by 1cm for 8-bit to 3mm by 3mm. I think the object might vibrate or shimmer in front of the viewer depending on how the eye perceives the colours. This is something I have been thinking about. It will certainly add more time to the construction. I did an experiment with this earlier this year with a piece called Anomaly. It is a rabbit head with really elongated ears that is made up of 3mm by 3mm pixels. The bunny looks fuzzy and with a precarious density.
TS: Does the pixellation of natural forms take something away from the detail of the real, or does it make the beholder more appreciative of the details?
SS: I feel that the pixilation forces the viewer to see what details are missing and what details have remained.
TS: How time-intensive and meticulous is the work involved in creating your sculptures?
SS: The time intensive component is a very important conceptual element. I am fascinated by how fast digital information can be moved, copied, and manipulated. It is this speed at which information can be altered that I take a contrary position to. I try to make these objects as laborious and analog as possible. I start with a found digital image of an object, usually of something I have no first hand experience with, and begin making drawings. The drawings are similar to an architectural type drawing showing scale and elevation. Then I start cutting my material, usually wood, into strips. Next, I set up a jig on my table saw to further mill the material into smaller pieces. After sorting the cut wood parts, I begin to colour the pieces. I hand mix the dyes and apply them to each individual piece. This is where the actual construction begins. I build the piece pixel by pixel in an effort to create a larger identity. I use the original drawings as a road map of sorts to help figure out where each pixel belongs.
TS: In your sculptures, there is the obvious absence of man – when will humanity make an appearance in your art?
SS: I am not sure where humanity will appear directly in my work. I have some ideas about this but I need some time to experiment and find my way. Still, I do think that humanity is indirectly in the work in the pixels and the reconstruction of nature.
TS: How nostalgic is your art?
SS: I don’t think of my work as nostalgic. I see it as re-representation of natural forms that are made up of small pieces of information – surrogates. During this re-fabrication, some bits of information are lost or distorted.
TS: Would you blame technology for the way we are increasingly removed from the real-world experience?
SS: That is a tough question to answer. I do think that certain technologies make people feel as if they are closer to others but still feel completely alienated at the same time.
This question makes me think of Vilem Flusser’s essay entitled ’The non-thing’ in his book The Shape of the Thing. But first, I need to describe a few ab-stract ideas that have a bearing on how I want to answer this question.
Humans have had a long developmental history with the thing – a symbiotic relationship with objects. Our mandibles and digestive process has developed into their current state because of our early ancestors using tools to cultivate different types of food and new ways to hunt more effectively.
Over the last 10 years or so, in our evolutionary trajectory, we have what Vilem Flusser coined as the ‘non-thing’ introduced into our day to day life to replace the thing.
Flusser describes a non-thing as software, a cable television show, digital information – things that the hand cannot directly interact with. Flusser describes a former simpler life in which we are comfortable with things.
So, all of this being said, I feel it is the non-thing that is changing our relationship with the real world – blurring the lines, greying the delineation between worlds.
It makes me question how will our evolutionary direction will change because of this new object in our lives – a conceptual thought which I like to toy around with in my studio.
Born in 1972 in Dallas, Texas, Shawn Smith attended Arts Magnet High School and Brookhaven College before graduating from Washington University in St Louis in printmaking. He read for a Masters in Fine Arts in sculpture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Smith has received artist-in-residencies from the Kala ArtInstitute in Berkeley and the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. In 1996, Smith was a recipient of the Clare Hart DeGolyer grant from the Dallas Museum of Art. Smith’s work has been exhibited throughout the US.