Matthew Sloly Portfolio CD Hyperornamentalpsychosexualenigmas 1996 - 1998, digital images, dimensions variable, 480 These are visual mutations produced through a loosely defined selective breeding process in which I was an integral and active agent, my exercise of aesthetic choice being the random element in a fractal iterative process. Occupying a position between simulacrum and abstraction, these images constrain and confound familiar determinants, deferring immediate categorization just long enough to give play to more peripheral, mutant, and shifting recognitions of the beautiful and the monstrous, sex and death, the organic and the technological, conjoined. My original intention was to produce a group of hybrid gestalt images by systematically combining and recombining a small number of progenitor-images. I used porn downloaded from the World Wide Web, x-rays of a human cranium and chest, scans of organic matter, and my own artwork from my digital archive, which already contained biomorphic references. The result is a whole genus of images that are fractally both self-similar and different. Each unit is part of a potentially infinite morphological process rather than being an amalgamation or a finite collage of image fragments. As the originating images are decomposed through a recombinant process, over the course of many iterations, artefacts emerge that are remarkably persistent, remaining recognizable long after the break down and disappearance of visual referents to the original progenitor images. What appears to be elaborate ornamentation actually is the result of my exploitation of random artefacts of the digital process through which the units were generated. Yet something of the originating images still survives as a latent presence, haunting each unit in the series like a spectre. This spectral entity transcends every instantiation of itself , and so through this process I was activating (or accessing) a property that was inherent within the ever expanding and metamorphosing aggregations of data that constituted my system of production. Thus I began to realize that informational processes had their own internal dynamics. Pixels are defined by code, numbers, combinations of ones and zeros. These processes need not have a visual form at all, yet they are only intelligible when they are visualized or otherwise made available to the senses in some material form. The process by which this occurred began to take on ever greater primacy for me. But this latent spectral presence that I mentioned above was not isolated to the series of images. My way of working at that time was to go on “binges”, in which I might be up for twenty-four to thirty hours at a time, creating batches of images, to be recombined in turn with others from the archive. It was through the extreme repetitiveness of this process that I came up against another important realization: that there are distinct modes of consciousness that are foregrounded at different moments in the rhythm of production. After one such binge, I went to sleep with my body twitching ever so slightly with the repetitive hand and eye movements associated with the subtle machinations of my production process. It was as if the activity had been somehow imprinted on my nervous system. And this imprinting was not only upon my motor reflexes. I also noticed its effects on my cognition; I would catch myself drawn to anything that had an ornate pattern as if I was looking at the computer monitor, the conditioned reflex illuminating my own subjectivety, by giving rise to a contrary reflex, a resistance to being absorbed in an activity that ready to click and drag something with my mouse. This curious side effect was both intriguing and repulsive for me. I felt myself cycling through different kinds of mental processes that gained distinction through repetition, but were intelligible only in succession, as a rhythm, rather than an array of discrete states. I was riding this process in order to sustain the sensation of these shifts of consciousness.