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Prix
The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Fur Gash
Linda Dement
The content of my work is highly personal and corporeal. It has to do with my own experience, memories, aggression, flesh, desire, madness, bloodlust and fantasy. I follow the logic of dream and hallucination to create a subterranean, subcutaneous narrative of personal symbols.
In order to work, I establish a tightly controlled framework of technology within which I can let go. I always exercise fascistic control over the mediums I choose. Being in control allows me to lose control and so let the art take care of itself. This lets me work with that which I cannot control: madness, unreason, the dark areas, indefinite and nebulous. Creativity allows me to use my abrogative, destructive tendencies, to wander over both sides of the line that marks out 'reasonable'. There is value, knowledge and danger in the unreasonable, in madness, and in pain. In making art, I can use that which threatens me and in doing so, decrease the threat by working through it. There is something about creativity that sustains.
The computer processes and stores information, my information, and gives it back to me within the order and framework I have demanded. It is about memory and about altering memory. I am able to enter into the computer a confusion of lies and pictures, work on them, out there in non-existent computer space, then see it appear on the screen with the weight of fact, technology and money.
Technical Background
HW: Macintosh
SW: Adobe Photoshop
In order to work, I establish a tightly controlled framework of technology within which I can let go. I always exercise fascistic control over the mediums I choose. Being in control allows me to lose control and so let the art take care of itself. This lets me work with that which I cannot control: madness, unreason, the dark areas, indefinite and nebulous. Creativity allows me to use my abrogative, destructive tendencies, to wander over both sides of the line that marks out 'reasonable'. There is value, knowledge and danger in the unreasonable, in madness, and in pain. In making art, I can use that which threatens me and in doing so, decrease the threat by working through it. There is something about creativity that sustains.
The computer processes and stores information, my information, and gives it back to me within the order and framework I have demanded. It is about memory and about altering memory. I am able to enter into the computer a confusion of lies and pictures, work on them, out there in non-existent computer space, then see it appear on the screen with the weight of fact, technology and money.
Technical Background
HW: Macintosh
SW: Adobe Photoshop
Linda Dement (AU), born 1960. M.F.A. College of Fine Arts University of NSW 1993; Post Graduate study Sydney College of the Arts 1989; B.A. (Fine Art) City Art Institute 1988. An exhibiting artist since 1984, with a background in photography, writing, film and animation, now working with computer based interactive installations and computer manipulated 2D imagery. Currently lecturing in photography and computer imaging at the College of the Fine Arts, UNSW and working as a freelance multi-media designer.