H. Schenck Response

While H. Schenck was here, he spent quite a bit of time with my printmaking class as we helped him complete a print he was working on. So I had a chance to spend a fair amount of time working and talking with him about our art, and I saw a lot of similarities between his interests, my interests, and Baudrillard's. His digital prints of artifacts and drawings are forms of simulation that are just a little too self-aware to really be simulations in the true, exact sense that Baudrillard is talking about, but they definitely evoke ideas of realness, reproduction and simulation. H. makes an artistic statement about these ideas without trying to actually replace or represent every aspect of the objects he depicts.

"It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it."

Clearly these ideas, even some of the visual techniques H. uses in his work (see above), are closely related to what I want to pursue in my work for this class. These layers of representation, transitioning from 3 dimensions to 2 and back, visible deterioration and emphasis on the physical quality of the subject and the process– these are the ideas that I want to lose myself in this term.

H.'s work squishes 3-dimensional objects that were once seen as 2-dimensional but, in capturing and their physical forms and suspending them arbitrarily in white space, wrinkles and all, H. both flattens them and reinforces their former 3-dimensionality. Then, in posting images of these works on his website, he takes another digital image of a paper print of a digital image of a physical object. These layers of simulation are everywhere, they are endless, and they are self-perpetuating. H. and I are explorers who like to plunge into the mundane pools and puddles that may be meaningless in themselves, but may lead to something worthwhile.

"It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes."

It'll be hard for me to move past my infatuation with simply the idea of simulation in all its complexity, but I'll try to do more with my work this term!