Tadej Droljc
Self-portrait
generative audiovisual painting, 2021
»Self-portrait presents the perception of myself, which is a synthesis of various influences and experiences processed in suspicious circumstances of memory. This conglomerate is malleable and heterogeneous and is held together only by a poetic gap in which memories cross-fertilize or just awkwardly stand next to each other. Accordingly, my experience of spirituality, where I was reborn out of the denial of my own infinity through the narrow frame of a limited ego, meets the materialism of neuroscience, which reduces this experience of nirvana to the trivial level of neural fireworks. These fireworks that, under a microscope, look like a chaotic avalanche of shooting starts are supposedly also managing my reason – ‘reason is 98 % unconscious’ (Lakoff, 2013). Turbulent forces of my unconscious would surely agree to that – they also reside somewhere in the sky and often make fun of the idea of ‘me’… Given that we are made of stars, all of this doesn’t even surprise me.«
Self-portrait is a generative audiovisual painting that is constantly being drawn. The painter’s audiovisual brush is led in real-time by pseudo-random algorithms in front of the audience, but yet it seems that the artist is not present. The work is in a constant state of becoming and provides a frame through which the time flows. Time does, however, not flow into the past but it accumulates in memory – this eternal present where an endless game of perspectives unfolds.
Photo: Damjan Švarc © ACE KIBLA.