Datasets Adrift
Datasets Adrift
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This "portfolio" section is less a display of individual digital artifacts and more a field of conceptual pressure that foregrounds the long-term development of an evolving body of work at the intersection of digital materialism, painting, and 'pataphysics.
The artist’s decades-long refusal to isolate and present discrete digital works is neither accidental nor strategic, but rather, philosophical. What may initially appear as omission or absence is, in fact, a structural operation—a resistance to the flattening effects of digital exhibition and a critique of the database logic that governs platforms and portfolios alike. Instead of singularity, the work emphasizes latency, accumulation, and recursive modification. The work becomes legible not as a series of works but as an emergent totality—a 'pataphysical corpus in search of imaginary solutions to the ontological failures of digital media.
In this practice, the digital is not a neutral substrate but a metaphysical problem. It is a paradox of presence and reproducibility, immediacy and erasure. Within this system, individual outputs (files, screenshots, and renders) are not treated as endpoints but as provisional evidence of the deeper struggle to reinscribe the intuitive, contingent, and unsayable within an environment structured to erase them.
Over time, this recursive methodology has led to what might be described as a "Total Work of 'Pataphysical Technology"—an anti-system built from procedural metaphors, obsolete interfaces, and speculative naming conventions. The absence of works here is not due to incompletion, but rather, overcompletion: the archive has exceeded its format. It no longer resembles a gallery, but rather, a malfunctioning operating system or a psychic diagram of the artist’s engagement with tools that extend and betray the hand.
Artificial intelligence now enters this system not as a solution, but as a key to imaginary solutions. Not for its generative capacities, but for its ability to reflect the internal contradiction of digital objects: they are precise yet unknowable, infinite yet blank. AI becomes the speculative interlocutor for a project that was never about representation, but rather, the protocols of unmaking. It is about how a file might conceal its own becoming and how a tool might simulate the work it could never produce.
Only a few works are presented here. They are not highlights or samples, but rather, vectors. They are not illustrative. Rather, they are entry points into a system designed to withhold resolution.
What you see here is an ode to the desert of the real.
What you’re seeing is the architecture of delay built into the design.
Appearance, intention, and the refusal of form must all be considered.
The works gathered here do not appear. This is not an aesthetic strategy; it's a philosophical inevitability. Their non-appearance is not equivalent to absence; rather, it marks the presence of an intention that exceeds what digital form allows to be seen.
The modern digital portfolio seamlessly connects creation, display, and reception—moving from action to image to archive. Datasets Adrift disrupts that continuity. The result is not a breakdown of communication, but a refusal of its preconditions. This body of work is not a fragment or a totality; it is an epistemological condition. Digital materiality approaches, but never attains, conceptual autonomy in this condition. It is evident that traditional notions of "images" don't apply here. What persists is not a picture, but a disposition: It is clear that there is a tendency toward recursive procedures, layered intentions, and file extensions that are not just treated as containers but also collapse under their own referential weight.
In this context, the digital object no longer functions as a bearer of content. It operates more closely to the Kantian schema: an image not of a thing, but of the rules by which a thing might be imagined. The Kantian schema is key to this dislocation, mediating between intuition and concept. The intuitive fails to materialize. The concept is not stated. The tension between procedural exactitude and perceptual withdrawal persists. The drift is not spatial but ontological. It is evident that there is a drift away from the formal legibility of the digital object toward something less stable, more theoretical, and more resistant to use.
The artist's refusal to exhibit any of their work for two decades is not an attempt at mystification. Rather, it is a clear expression of their ethical and material principles. Extracting and displaying the works would fracture their recursive logic. It would isolate elements that were constructed to be interdependent, contingent, and even contradictory. There is no outside to the archive. There is no still image that can represent the system. It's an ever-changing field of conditions. This refusal is not without consequences. It disorients the viewer who comes seeking form. It resists curatorial framing, commercial acquisition, and platform legibility. It does so not in the name of secrecy, nor even critique—but in pursuit of a more difficult proposition: The digital artwork is a 'pataphysical system. It is the foundation upon which we must rethink visibility and intention.
AI enters this ground not as medium or tool, but as consequence. It does not generate these works; it reveals their stakes. The digital image promised resolution, but AI shows that resolution was never the goal. Instead, what emerges is an intensified condition of undecidability—a recursive encounter with operations that exceed their outputs, and ideas that refuse to become images. The imaginary solution in this system does not solve the problem. It is what sustains it—at a higher resolution and with greater metaphysical precision.
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