Output details

Picturing ideas? Visualising and Synthesising Ideas as art (2009-10). Artworks include: ‘Untitled (Abstraction of Labour Time External Recurrence Monad)', 2009. Backlit digital print on vinyl, 450 x 7660 cm, exhibited at Dark Monarch, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, 9 October 2009 – 10 January 2010; and Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, 23 January 2010 – 15 March 2010; and ‘Untitled (Abstraction of Labour Time External Recurrence Monad II)', 2009. Archival Inkjet Print on metallic silver polyester, 841 x 643mm. Exhibited at Invisible Exports Gallery, New York. Publication: Russell, J. 'Why are conceptual artists juicing again? Because they moisturise its a glistening sparkle' (2009). Frieze Magazine, September 2009: 108-112

The importance of this multiple-output, AHRC funded research project lies in its unique practice-led intervention into contemporary debates regarding the art historically constituted opposition between text and image. For instance the distinctions routinely drawn between the ‘literary’ and the ‘visual’ or recent publications/conferences addressing ideas of ‘visualization’ and ‘diagramming.’ Specifically this research addresses the question: How can the philosophical be ‘visualised’ or ‘pictured’ using computer-generated imagery? The research involved the development of a series of images produced in response to dialogues with specialists in the fields of philosophy, psychology, art and film. These discussions were concerned with the ‘picturing’ or 'visualising' of ‘ideas’ within different disciplines. Both the interactions and the images were recorded on the website www.whatdoideaslooklike.blogspot.com. The final images were outputted in a range of formats: as large scale, backlit digital prints exhibited at prestigious international exhibitions: Tate St Ives, Norwich Art Gallery, and Towner Art Galleries in the UK; as giclee prints exhibited at Invisible Exports Gallery, New York and Devos Art Museum, Northern Michigan University (2010); as a lightbox at Museum of Contemporary Art, Haifa (2012); and as illustrations in five publications (2010-12). The artworks were widely reviewed: Independent (5/10/09); Frieze (Jan 2010); and Tateshots, Tate website (13/11/09).These ideas were developed and evaluated in the essay 'Why are conceptual artists […]' (Frieze magazine, September 2009), using the images as illustrations, and papers delivered at University of Ulster, Goldsmiths College, Loughborough University and UCL, where Russell argued for a potential realisation of an unfulfilled legacy of conceptual art within the transforming interfaces of web 2.0. Replayed as a dynamic form of ‘virtuality’, the ‘dematerialisation’ of the image (Lippard, 1968) and mutability of digital form, mirror the ‘virtual’ nature of philosophical ideas and enable a cross-articulation of art and philosophy, and image and text.