OLAV WESTPHALEN

A maze of shafts and caves, made up of three elements endlessly recombined: rock, dirt, beams. […] Inhabitants: same stuff as architecture.
Distinctions blurred between animate and inanimate […] an array of concrete abstractions, a modular alphabet. Any event can be spelled out. Here, a children’s party, a crime scene can look like modernist sculpture […] the semi-abstract, wooden toys at Waldorf schools. […] Declination of forms through different media prompts comparison: are drawings more present than digital animations? Are both bleeding into some sort of quasi-presence?
[…] Given the ready translatability from drawing to virtual object to prototype, the virtual is infused with a creepy plausibility, while physical reality becomes palpably contingent. […] Not in the manner of ideology critique or deconstruction (through a critique of linguistic representation), but in immediate sensory experience. […] How to orient
yourself under these conditions? What will satire, what will formal sculpture/personal narrative look like? What will politics look like in the tunnels? […] Grasp the simultaneous abstractions of financial markets, digital spaces, Neo-Formalist art.
[…]Tom Sawyer’s cave (Ariadne’s thread), Alice’s Wonderland, Gravity’s Rainbow, the Vietcong maze, Minecraft […] images of tunnels in Gaza. […] A hole in the ground leads to “Sketchland”, the peculiar realm in Charles Dickens’ eponymous satire where humans obey the laws of drawing and body-parts can be erased without them dying. […] Tunnel
visions: the information spheres we inhabit. We don’t search the web, but revisit the accreted bias of previous searches […] an endlessly expanding, yet rapidly narrowing world. […] A “gap of detectability”
is caused by the legal limits to pixel-sizes in satellite-images (50 x 50 centimeters). It turns a human figure seen from above into a single, grey
pixel, indistinguishable from surrounding pixels representing architecture, machinery, landscape.

Olav Westphalen