Ben Bloch

Artist Statement

We want art to have a sublime effect. It reminds us of our impermanence, and of what lies beyond our ordinary senses. In a similar way, technology is sublime. The vastness of the internet exists beyond the comprehension of a single mind, and our fierce attachment to digital technologies can’t be explained simply by their usefulness. As an artist, I explore the metaphysics and magic that linger in the foggy spaces between nature and technology. Though science may explain the function of digital transmissions, it remains astounding that the wish for a particular song, image, or program can be satisfied by what “feels like” conjuring information out of thin air. What does it mean that so much information is flying around us, completely unseen? As we witness the rapid advancement of so many tools, we inevitably become entangled in the beauty, sadness, mystery—and even fear—of modern technology. As an artist, I work across a variety of media: primarily painting, but also video, performance, and social experience. Movement, audio, computer language, and animation can be vital means for exploring new phenomena and concepts, while not abandoning a painterly sensibility that balances composition, color, time, sound, and language.

The two videos submitted (Liberation of the Paranoid World and The Glass Bead Game) both address grief—in particular, a shared social grief—that populations across time and space experience. Liberation of the Paranoid World is an homage to an ever-arriving apocalypse, and the potential freedoms beyond. The Glass Bead Game plays loosely with ideas from Herman Hesse’s novel by the same name, mixing the beauty of nature, the balletics of a strange physical game, and the consistent tragedies detailed on the daily news, Both pieces focus in on the high tensions between nature and technology in our modern world, and resonate with a now-daily experience of loss and grief.