INFO AS MATERIAL

"Our raw materials are string and glue," said Earl Benton, Toray's director of sales and marketing. Just across the road, the alchemy is completed. Boeing turns these threads into the tailfin of the 787, the world's first largely plastic airliner." (The Seattle Times, Mar, 2007).


Carbon is everywhere around us all the time, and information is becoming the same. Like carbon which can readily combine to form elements and compounds, information becomes useful once we give it form and meaning. The work of the artist has always been to shape form in a meaningful way; it seems logical that artists should see information as material for art-making.

Information comes in an never-ending flow. Making ideas requires grouping information into new structures that can provide meaning. Ideas act as nodes, where information gathers and can become attached to other information. In the process it can become totally transformed. Not unlike chemical equations- when certain bits of information are placed in close proximity to other bits, something entirely new can result.

The artist’s job is to create ideas/nodes by exploring the grouping and regrouping of information. Novelty is important not for its own sake but because new ideas are generated by re-considering the relationship of information. Sculpture has always been about building things, connecting ideas as material structures is the same.

Networks of ideas are strings of ideas cojoined together. Concepts group information together in a structural way that produces a dynamic output.

Artists have long been occupied with the preservation of their finished artworks- using materials that wouldn’t quickly degrade. Working with ideas is no different, and ways need to be developed so that concepts are fresh and hold together.

Research is the process by which ideas become unearthed from information. Research requires digging and lateral thinking- otherwise its nothing more than note taking, and nothing important or beautiful will come of it. Like other art making methods and techniques, research into information requires patience, vigilance, practice and skill. It also takes time. The internet is a useful tool, but like all kinds of other tools available to artists, it cannot itself produce ideas, let alone art.

Boeing is using the carbon threads to hold resins that are injected into it. The carbon becomes a place-holder. The resinful threads are then woven into, shaped into, airplane structures. A seemingly simple process is the result of very complex thinking and experimentation over decades by many collaborators and investigators. Artists have always done R&D, they’ve always experimented. Doing so in networks with others increases the possibility of creating new ideas. And like carbon atoms, there are plenty of ideas to go around- working with others doesn’t lessen the amount of possibilities in the universe, or reduce the amount available to an individual artist. But it does make new groupings within the grasp of a particular artist.

Research and collaboration are natural allies of the individual artist, even if to do both well requires something different than the stance of the fiercely stand alone practioneer.
I have spent decades looking at materials and collaborating with those who work with them. This has been a terrific object lesson in the manipulation of ideas. Though the people I observed and with whom I worked were making things from materials like rubber and tin, what they were really doing was reshaping ideas, moving those ideas in the form of new products, around the world. Looked at from a global perspective- materials handling is movement of ideas.