Inside the system

Artist's Statement

The project pursues the idea of "hiding and/or obscuring the reality", depicting an artificial city environment where inhabitants are bound to and cannot leave it, although they are not necessarily unhappy in it. My view searches and finds bright, beautiful and visually complex images in the natural city environment, the images that could participate in telling my story of living inside an artificial system constructed by humans. I collect and combine city elements, and process them, (without any manipulation, though), creating a completely new reality.

Since I'm working constantly with computers, I am accustomed to operate abstract, artificial non-material objects, like operating systems, databases and spreadsheets (to name the few). For me it is quite natural to see, feel and work with things that exist only in the informational, rather than physical, world.

My 'digitized' mind creates a very special vision of a city environment, which, in its turn, can be viewed as a superposition of many interconnected systems. The city for me is no longer a collection of simple material objects: streets, buildings, tunnels and bridges. Instead, due to its indefinite connections and subsystems it becomes as complex as the nature itself, where we are unable to follow and understand all the links. I can just 'observe' it, feel it and be in it, like I do in a forest or in the sea.

As a computer programmer I see my city life inside a huge operating system, within a system of equations, inside brackets and parentheses. I'm developing my expressive language using the city environment itself and different elements that it offers to me. Those elements are buildings, skyscrapers, reflective and transparent surfaces. Instead of pretending on understanding all the complexity, I just depict city elements and infix them in my images, by using reflections, dissections, mixture, seeing through, layering existing objects, sometimes revealing and sometimes encrypting the surrounding reality.