Liu Xiaobo a 54 year old Chinese poet, literary critic and pro-democracy agitator having served 20 months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and currently imprisoned on an11 year sentence for calling out for multi-party democracy that respected human rights has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Liu claims the Tiananmen Square massace inspired his activism. Chinese authorities responded negatively to the news of the dissident’s award labeling it as obscene such an award going to a criminal, implying the awarding of the peace prize to such a person also lowers the peace prize itself. The award was announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee president Thorbjoern Jagland.
Political Arts | Ian Bunn Visual Artist
My digital art work is essentially politics and art. It’s about iconic people, places and events of our day. Recorded visually through daily compilations of manipulated digital images, posted online and disseminated via online media and social networks. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectator’s experience of the contemporary digital age. The resulting work intentionally has a painterly aesthetic acknowledging my historical painting practice.
Adapting Pop Art’s notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, the work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our sub consciousness. The work is essentially popular culture arts, diverging from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead this work focuses on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.
This digital photo manipulation art work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself. Hence this work considers fragmented elements of Popular Culture through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day.
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