Benoit Mandelbrot aged 85 has died. Dr Mandelbrot a French American mathematician renown for his study of fractal geometry, a ground breaking method to measure irregular outlines. The fractal geometry he developed by his mathematical formulas created intricate shapes that enabled the measure of natural phenomena once believed to be immeasurable such as clouds and coastlines. His theory was applied to such diverse disciplines such as finance physics and biology. Dr Mandelbrot became professor emeritus at Yale University, originating from Poland he moved as a child with his family to be educated in France. The geometric shapes he created attracted a pop culture status due to their stunningly beautiful representations.
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.
