An Interview With... Jamie Stantonian
What is your background?
Although I’ve had creative tendencies since a young boy, I didn’t formally study art, as I was put off by a cantankerous and unsupportive art teacher at school. Instead, I went to uni and studied media and communications theory in the late 90s, which led, in turn, to be a meandering journey to being first a website designer, to today, being an experienced architect. This is a very strange profession to my mind and places you at the sharp end of technology’s impact on society. You get to see first hand the disorientation it continues to cause organisations in the face of this unrelenting change.
You get to see consultants who perform what to my eyes look like tribal rituals involving post-it-notes and whiteboards to try and mask that fact that only a small fraction of the actions they perform have a meaningful impact, though they themselves are perhaps not sure what that percentage is. I see them like ancient metallurgy cults who had elaborate rituals for smelting and forging metals that involved lots of spells and dancing and birthing metaphors, but whose practitioners knew not the first thing about the actual atomic physics they were manipulating. They knew *something* worked but didn’t know precisely what, and wouldn’t for many thousands of years.
What inspired you to be an artist?
The path that led me to be part of the Tunnel, and exhibiting art, began in 2012 after I had what I guess could be called a mystical experience. Such episodes are notorious for their refusal to be accurately articulated, but at the time it felt as if I was staring into the face of eternity. Immediately, I was inspired to try and articulate this artistically, and used as material two photos I had taken in a nearby museum as a starting point and began to develop them on my iPad (the first of these two pieces were Machine Mind and Cognitive Analytics). I followed this direction of blending photography, glitch art and illustration for the next few years, although in recent time I’ve begun experimenting with mixed media again.
In this time I’ve tried to articulate what I experienced during this episode in one of two ways, in writing and in art, so to come at it from two different directions. A key part of the themes I’m trying to articulate is the role of art in human evolution and art as a form of information technology and from there, the place of humanity in the greater cosmic context. Reading about what we know scientifically about the nature of reality, we know that complexity evolves over time – a sun is a significantly older, and far less complex entity than a cell. We also know that this complexity goes through phase transitions, the latest of which appears to be humanity – the eusocial mammalian superorganism with the capacity to manipulate more and more aspects of the underlying substructures of matter. Every human interaction with one another and with our environment alters a fundamental process of the cosmos, which is a vast and eternally evolving system moving towards… what? I think the mystical experience is a glimpse, however brief, of the awe and immensity of this unfolding process, when the eternal now blends into the two great infinite behind and before us. A window on this expansive vista before it is again occluded by language and conceptual thought, which can only ever approximate through words and art that lies beyond.
How long have you been practising art?
Before this episode, I’d dabbled in making, amongst other things, music, paintings and digital illustrations for years, and had been drawing since I was very young. (I have a box full of drawings I made when I was about 9 or 10 that were inspired by VHS and trashy paperback cover art) but other than a concept album I made over a decade ago, most of my creative output was professional, up until 2012.
What is/are your favourite mediums?
Much of my work is digital collage mixed with glitch art, using old books, illustrations, postcards and paintings I’ve collected in the last few years. Though I also like restricting myself just to the materials that our remote ancestors would have had access to, such as ochre paste and wood. The oldest continually operated mine in the world is in Australia and has been in use for something like forty thousand years. I find the transience of these pieces an interesting contrast to the immensity of time that the technology’s been used for. Each time I exhibit them they are a little more worse for wear, a little more worn away by entropy.
Who/what would you say your key influences/inspirations are?
When I was young, definitely the surrealists, especially Magritte. Today, I am fascinated by the emergent symbolic vocabularies you see online. One of these are memes, which have matured over the last few years to become far more sophisticated. Think back to memes from a decade ago or so, like, say, “Socially Awkward Penguin,” which are pretty easy going for the uninitiated. Now you have these meta memes, full of references to other memes based on stock photos, scenes from TV shows, graphs, all swirling together in this rich new symbolic language where every detail and every hand gestures and expressions are full of meaning. In that sense, they’re developing into something like religious iconography.
Then you have the symbolism employed by the likes of conspiracy theorists, where you get these arrangements of text, photos, boxes, lines, scribbles and diagrams arranged ominously on these huge digital canvases. For the most part, the creators see meaning where nothing is there. They are consequences of evolved pattern seeking behaviours meeting the exponential oceans of information we’re exposed to online.
What inspired your work in this exhibition?
It was an experimental mixed media piece about the labyrinthine pathways of technological evolution, playing its transformative role in this great unfolding of complexity. Despite all the doom and gloom, we see in the world, whatever we represent from an evolutionary perspective is only just getting started, certainly from a geological perspective. I hope to capture something of that sense of both foreboding and anticipation, that for all our sophistication we barely understand what we are doing or where we are going – but that we’re only now starting to wake to our full potential. Humanity’s origin story is far from over.
What project are you working on now/planning to work on in the near future?
I’m working on a video series at the moment centred on the 80s-era mass hysteria the Satanic Panic as a way of exploring the ideas outlined above. I find the subject interesting on a number of levels, one being as a mythic reaction to a rapidly changing world because of new technologies – everything from the H-bomb, the television and the electric guitar to the contraceptive pill. The role the mass media played in spreading the social contagion and the way the new clerisy of psychotherapists seemed to corroborate the far-out Christian conspiracy theories is also deeply fascinating, and it has some important lessons both about social psychology and how ideas and memes percolate through social media in our own times. Looking to get this launched this summer, or failing that, Halloween.
For more information about Jamie’s work, please contact the Hundred Years Gallery or follow Jamie on the links below:
