Digital Inkjet Print
Digital Inkjet Print
Mount Olympia_1
Fudge never updated his computer programs. I don’t know how he did it; the flashing update icon alone makes me feel nervous. Fudge’s working material is the now obsolete technology of the 1990s. Take, for example, his “Machine of Connectivity and Undo”, printed to stainless steel and dated 1994-2015. It is post-internet in the way that it uses the tools of the Web to create an object that ultimately exists in the real world. The long incubation period of the work (1994-2015) refers to (and let me quote the artist because digital materialism is a thing on its own): “The process of reworking (editing, updating etc.) a digital image over time is not visible to the eye and can only be seen and understood by referring to the metadata of the image file i.e., date of creation, date of modification etc.)” Fudge’s inkjet print “Machine of Connectivity and Undo” also demonstrates why his artworks never give the impression of being overdone. Fudge prefers to press the “undo” button. But not to the point of total annihilation. A digital deconstruction takes place. In this case, as the artist explained to me, “a neo-cubist version of an Apple Newton Messagepad 110, the first personal handheld assistant device dating from the mid-1990s.” As such, Fudge’s prints are simultaneously dated and futuristic. They are modern, postmodern and post-postmodern, all in one; or “metamodern”, as the artist points out.