Bud and Betty Micheels
student artist-in-residence grant

MARK TINUCCI 1993-94

This Artist-in-Residence program was a discovery of two seemingly polar intellectual caverns: art and technology. The two entities presented together became an endeavor of the right and left brain, the metaphysical and the scientific, black and white.

This dichotomy was challenging for me until I began to ask questions of the human condition. One assumes technology connotes scientific knowledge, and in all philosophical 'heaviness' it does. However, it was the Italian writer Italo Calvino in his lecture entitled Six Memos for the Next Millenium who convinced me that knowledge of the world dissolves the solidity of the world.

I am a person who feels somewhat inadequate to resolve these questions, for I believe in the mystic and ascend to the romantic. I believe in the scratches and dust on vinyl records. I do not own a single CD. I do not prescribe to nor possess a telephone. I can turn a computer on but could not tell you how to turn it off.

This study of the relationship between art and technology is about showing the connection of artifacts and light. This project allowed me to explore the concept of dematerialization.

I am not the first nor will I be the last to figure upon dematerialization. George Orwell anticipated this concept in his book 1984.

Through technology, objects (and I'm including man) are transforming and dematerializing at a fast rate. As we transfer information, money, and ideas electronically over telephone lines and through satellites, we loose the concrete solidity of the original and tangible purpose.

In science and technology, the means justifies the end while in art it is the converse.

In the words of Bruce Nauman's 1967 wall sign: "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." And all we can hope for is the justification of our pursuit of mystic truths.

"Monument to Labor" steel, acrylic, wood