Hanna Stolpe

I am a self-taught artist. I seldom plan the outcome of my work, I see my art as a meditation process in where the canvas and shades tells me a story that I, as a mediator, highlights what needs to be told. Mostly I connect these stories to theories in my academic field of media and communication and cultural studies, how technologies of communication form cultures, and how we interact as human beings in these technology cultures.

 

My illustrations are not new, you have seen this entertainment through and through...

 

 

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My digital gallery is full of paint with no meaning

 

New ways of interpreting artistic communication emerge and transform the way we read and understand texts.

 

What is your thoughts when reading a text in a digital landscape? Now, what we call visiable culture and art, crafts, forms to fit in a new media of communication. How spectators read and experince artistic media separates the reader even more far away from origin and the authors purpose of creative work. "The origin of a work may lie with the author, but its destination is with the reader. “… [T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (Barthes 1967, 386)

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17/3 - 16

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However, if Barthes ideas were relevant in the sixties, this might not be true in the digital landscape we experience culture today. The death of the author has converged into a new context of reading texts, in where backstage access and lifestyles are favored, to the cost of the artistic expression itself. The meaning comes through the lifestyle of the author, which might mean something rather different. The value in a cultural object depends on who have produced it. Which reminds us of how Dali created value in his persona and signature. The artwork becomes a brand through social media, which becomes a message in the context of consumption. When connecting, like(ing) or purchasing a peace of art, the consumer or reader sends a message about her/himself through the lifestyle of the creator. So what we got here is failure in communication. The birth of the brand must be at the cost of the death of the cultural expression. 

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Hanna 

 

 

 

6/3-15

 

 

When art implies with digitalisation 

 

Traditional ways of experience art can't break through the digital filter. Shadows and contrasts blurs in to the digital filter and the true meaning of expression in a canvas collapses. That is why hyper realism and artworks trying to resemble the real in exact aesthetics, characterises the twenty tenth century's art scene. 

 

Reality and visible culture tries to resemble each other. The real are getting more and more aestheticised and visible culture called art has more resemblance with commercials and staged, styled reality.

 

Baudrillards comment on reality and art in modernity. 

 

"Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, an aesthetic value, and so we come from art to aesthetics… And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism. And this is the very end of art. As form."

–Jean Baudrillard, 2005

 

 

 

26/2-16

 

The Ironclad reader

 

 

”When technology extends ONE of our senses, 

a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly 

as the new technology is interiorized.” 

(Marshall McLuhan 1962/2011 p.47).

 

In our time most people seeking to be heard, no one seems to be interested in listening.  The Ironclad Reader is a metaphor describing how technologies slowly through history have armored the reading subject with blinders before ”the Text”. The text is not solely readable in letters, the text is printed in all materia we see and hear, everything have a meaning, a story to tell if you are ready for it. 

 

The Ironclad reader is someone who is covered in iron, unable to be attacked, questioned, or defeated. No text will get through his mask, changing his ideas or points of views.

 

The last couple of decades, with digitalization and internet, the flow of information and communication have gone through a historical break or a discursive turn. How people consume, read and understand texts are an effect of the dominant communication technology in a specific time and in a specific culture. Different societies uses their senses more or less based on which medium for communication a community is used with, this in turn ”shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action”(McLuhan 1964/2001 s.9).

 

In our time personal computers and mobile phones are the dominant media for production and consumption of texts. Through their interface and software which are getting more lifelike and not far away from figure out what the users are looking for or thinking about, large quantities of data are being produced, stored and processed.

 

I think the dominant communication systems of today could say something about how media forms peoples actions and perspectives of the world.

 

/H