I’ve been trying to juggle my art practice, full time work and an emmerging writing practice over the last few months… Below is an exerpt from a piece I wrote for Darren Banks (http://www.darrenbanks.co.uk/) about his Blobs series of drawings and prints….
The eponymous Blob first crept onto movie screens, and into the collective consciousness in 1958, as an unstoppable, flesh-eating, gelatinous mass. Just as mankind pushed the frontiers of human exploration and endeavor to the outer limits of space (Sputnik was launched in 1957) and the innermost realms of the human genome (discovery of the double helix, Watson and Crick, 1953), the semi-conscious, amorphous Blob creature, came to epitomize a latent and horrific vision of life that could be excavated in these remote and unexplored territories of human experience. In 2010, the uncharted worlds are less the distant regions of space, or the microscopic iota of life, but increasingly those spaces of artificial life worlds created by the collision of biology and technology. These undiscovered worlds represent the new frontier of human experience. The semi-conscious blobs which we encounter there, will be the new form of alien life; hybrids of genetics and technology, culture and programming, and imagination and artificial intelligence.
From the crucible of Darren Banks’ imagination, ambiguous mutant forms, menacing and contaminating blobs are distilled (or invoked) into our flimsy concept of reality. Hovering in the white space of creation as if examined under a microscope, these amoeba-like phenomena seem to occupy the fragile states between animal instinct and artificial intelligence. The intricately rendered entities have the organic, visceral qualities of genetic material, something tumescent, and protean, mutating like a cancerous bunch of cells. But these are held in a tenuous equilibrium with the industrial looking elements, though warped and melting, which bespeak an uncomfortable degree of organization and intelligent purpose. These monsters of the deep regions of the psyche seethe with delicate menace. The titles offer no clues to these paradoxical beings, and offers us no key to signification or understanding there, Blob 19, Blob 20, Blob 21, merely points back to their shapeless, unknowable form, enclosing them in their ever unresolved system of mysterious evolution. They are the uncanny, fragmentary stuff of nightmares, that cannot be fully remembered upon waking. Instead these hybrid, impossibly ambivalent things (benignly familiar, so we cannot entirely separate ourselves from them) contaminate and destabilize our systems of knowledge, because they are unquantifiable, contradictory and impossibly ‘other’. The monster of mythology, and of science fiction, reflects as much upon the society, ideology and cultural climate from which it is born, as upon the anxieties, fears and obsessions of its creator.
…for full text please go to
http://schediosunrehearsed.blogspot.com/2010/06/19th-june-darren-banks-first-draft.html
