The latest issue of IT’s Art Magazine, #0004 is available online free for view-only pdf and and $3.50 for the printable version. It includes interviews with and work by Eric Scala, Fred Bastide, Marc Simonneti, Ziv Qual, Isabelle Hubert Olivier, Philippe Batini and yours truly, André SC.
Availble in French and reasonable English.

So, in view of shameless self promotion herewith an excerpt from the editorial column as well as from the text of my interview. For all the fabulous images in it is more than worth the download.

…artists with different inspiration and various working methods, but these two concepts merge: a vision and an inventive mind continuously in search of new horizons. This research can give birth to more than new artwork but can also suggest a new way to describe the world and introduce us to it.

The most blatant example in this issue is certainly André SC’s proposition. This South African artist whom in one way follows the tracks drawn by Nathaniel Stern and in another, gives us his own vision of “Compressionism”. This art is in equilibrium somewhere between the real world and the virtual one using technology to simultaneously promote questions and offer answers to the audience…

Experimentation – Clements AS

What can you obtain if you associate a certain number of images coming from the result of search engine? Here one of the first questions which we can obtain as an answer when we ask André SC for a definition of what compressionism is. Born in 1973 in Pretoria, André SC studied the design at the university of Pretoria, André SC or it also approached disciplines as varied as psychology, data processing, formal logic, philosophy and contemporary epistemology. It lives and works today in Johannesburg, where he teaches the new media in last year of design of the media and technologies cycle course at Damelin.

André exposed his work at on exhibitions such as ` One the record/Off the record’ to Gordart and ` Porn Again’ at the Merely Mortal’s gallery. He collaborates with other artists like John Moore and his ` Book of Dreams’ and more recently with Nathaniel Stern, one of the pioneers of the compressionism. He should present a work around the compressionism, at the end of 2006, beginning of 2007. From an exchange of correspondence, we built this small dialogue, for better understanding the origins and the mean of André SC artististic vision. André SC proposes to us some exploration tracks around this new art and comment us some of his artwork.

IT’S ART: How did you discover digital art?

André SC: I was lucky enough to have studied graphic design in an environment that still knew what French-curves, gauche and epidiascopes are. I was also fortunate enough to discover Photoshop and CorelDraw – think it was version 3 or 4. (Yes, I remember punch cards and removable hard drives the shape and size of flying saucers).

I recall my lecturers were dubious of all the new digital technology – often arguing that the technology leads to clinical spirit-less or generically homogenous work. I understood much of their concern but I have always believed that technology is nothing more than an extension of its user – and I love new toys. For the time being technology is just a tool, an implement, and the character of work generated with it depends on how the artist uses and engages with these tools. Admittedly these boundaries are increasingly indistinct and for example in net.art technology becomes as much art, as medium and tool.

I.A.: Which is the link with compressionism?

A. SC: The ideas about holarchies, that our world is one of ‘wholes that are parts of other wholes, and vice versa, all the way up and all the way down’ are beautifully obvious in the digital realm. But what does it mean in art? As an artist you have something like a mandate, quite possibly more like an addiction, to look at the world that surrounds us in different ways. To look at different levels of reality, to deny or acknowledge, to record and re-interpret what you encounter. It is also a well-known fact that a little elegant hack-ery, creative improvisation and a healthy sense of irony is generally a healthy thing.

I like the idea of compressionism. With compressionism I don’t mean a specific style of art, a conventional movement or some taxonomy tag, and must point out that nathaniel stern’s Compressionism http://Compressionism.net (I strongly recommend going to have a look) is a “movement as such†with its own rules – with which I do not always comply. When I imagine compressionism, I’m fantasizing about something that reflects the intricacy, the complexity, the constant tango between chaos and order, between recognition and ambiguity in the processes of human cognition. And how this in turn reflects in digital technology, in culture and in art.

This compressionism could simply be a phenomena confronting the ‘suspense of disbelief’ cult in main stream digital media, or not, but at least something that in some way acknowledges our contemporary world and in particular engages with its overload of information and inter relatedness of it all, and is somehow beautiful in the face of it all.

I like the idea of the environment, or the recorded version of ‘reality’, being allowed to engage in a creative dialogue through the artists’ aesthetic and technical decisions, and their interaction. Allowing the potential for a new kind of ‘integrity’ in work. Work that is not merely a reproduction, nor is it purely an interpretation; it becomes a synthesis and extension, an ontological accretion if you will. Something that includes but also transcends the source.

This kind of approach to visual exploration can lead to what I like to think of as a kind of post-painterly-digital-abstraction, as in this piece.

These pieces are recent additions to a series of digital prints entitled ‘Net Porn’ which were part of a group exhibition under the heading’Porn Again’ at Merely Mortal Gallery, curetted by Gordon Froud in 2005.

Pink for example is exact average of lot of rather generic pornographic images, a couple of hundred in this case piled one on top of another and carefully mathematically averaged. If for some reason you’ve ever doubted the prominent role of pink in freely accessible online pornography, doubt no more.

Net Porn : Pink

Wha is happening if you use the word ‘Facial’ ?

I applied generative methods to banality, and based on the premise of emergence through complexity, and autopoeitic systems theory, I attempted to visually and conceptually confront assumptions about the nature of vulgarity and aesthetics. (In other words, could you, by selectively combining salacious graphics, arrive at something you could comfortably have hanging in your lounge when your mother-in-law comes to visit).

Net Porn : Lust

When you start aligning a few common denominators, interesting things start to happen. The result may be blurry, but… a kind of holographic principle kicks in. If one image can tell or speak a thousand words, maybe more images of the same face can tell you something about the personality that animates that face. Perhaps the result will look a bit more like one’s actual, non-static, visual experience of a person. On some level of consciousness we all carry ambiguous ‘models’, pictures if you will, that make up the stuff we know – our personal epistemologies ?