WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange, a controversial figure after the release of 76000 US documents on the Afghanistan war has had an arrest warrant issued in Sweden. Swedish authorities issued the arrest warrant alleging rape, reportedly alleged by two women aged 20 and 30.  Less than a day later the warrant was revoked.  A statement from the Chief Prosecutor Eva Finne indicated the allegations of Rape were no longer suspected and would no longer be pursued. Assange lives part-time in Sweden, seeking to distance himself after the document leak, claimed to be the most significant  leak since the Vietnam War Pentagon Papers leak.  Assange had been warned that a smear campaign was imminent.

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.