Data-Sets Adrift—Philosophical Investigations
Data-Sets Adrift—Philosophical Investigations
The central problem is that of the artist and how to unify a vast, unresolved archive.
The digital archive ranges from the earliest desktop-era compositions to the most recent experiments with machine learning. In this sense, the website is an experiment in metaphysical user experience (M–UX)—an artwork in the form of navigation or a slow-motion implosion of the digital studio.
On structure
This is neither a lexicon nor a stable taxonomy.
Content is arranged in overlapping, intersecting, and diverging paths. Data–Sets are grouped under symbolic themes: Painted Desert, Yellowstone, and Liberty Drive and so on. Each theme is a container for related concepts.
Drive A (Liberty Drive): The teleology of presets and the ideological ghosts of software tools.
Drive B (Painted Desert): simulacra, simulation, and Nietzsche’s erased horizon.
Drive C (Yellowstone): Platonic workspaces and algorithmic desertification.
Subfolders further explore these themes through speculative allegories—visual essays on tool palettes, anti-interfaces, algorithmic thresholds, and user presets as theological issues. In Drive B, for example, subfolders 008–015 depict image-processing operations as philosophical theater. Other folders investigate predetermined ranges of algorithmic possibility, such as the materialization of probability and the fate of presets.
Each drive operates as a distorted cubist panel, refracting an idea through media, styles, and timeframes.
On updating, machine learning, and retroactive futurity.
Fudge’s method is recursive. He creates new works and continually rewrites, edits, and reprocesses his digital corpus, which dates back to 1994. This is less a form of revisionism than a retrospective futurity—a mode of working in which the past is updated according to the speculative logic that animated it.
Recent works influenced by machine learning and language-to-image systems have given new urgency to older inquiries. Fudge has long suspected that the real horizon—after Nietzsche’s death of God—is the disappearance of the image itself. From glyph to bitmap, from disc to diffusion model, the trajectory is clear. The image, once drawn or painted, is now spoken into being.
In the 1990s, Fudge allegorized the digital tools used to create digital allegories. Today, he views these automated, fluid, textually summoned tools as having fulfilled their teleological arc. What was once metaphorical has become literal. The image is a sentence. The sentence is a system. Systems rewrite themselves.
Art history is not the context. The context is the disappearance of art.
No comparable archive exists.