Andrew Boynton
b. Lakeland, FL
Like the grain of wood, time is anisotropic; you get different values depending on thedirection you are headed. Currently, technology has framed time as a throttling linear line, hurtling towards unchecked and sinister progression. The Middle Ages, however, saw time as a series of agricultural cycles fixed to a fall from the original perfection of God’s grace, making time a kind of corkscrew away from the divine. In this body of work, I photograph a collision of these two times, where peasants are stalked by a technological specter, knights bear surveillance crosses, and lasers land on feudal landscapes.
The prevailing word of 2024 was the self-diagnosing term "brain rot," used to visualize the
process of mental degradation at the hands of technological super corporations and the apps and media they produce. Our ability to occupy the present is slipping away, and instead, people are seeking asylum in the past or future. Take, for instance, the SCA (Society of Creative Anachronism), a group of thousands of people who gather throughout the year to live a medieval life together, waging wars with no sides in the middle of the Mississippi woods. But peeking its head around every corner are reminders of the present that everyone runs away from so desperately. Golf carts, cameras, and phones contrast with the shining armor and canvas tents. Technology here is totemic. In Death Shall Not Keep You From Me, a pair of lovers lay impaled together on a sword in an act of Arthurian love, but watching on just behind them is an array of red lights. The technologic gaze is algorithmic and cunning.
I am interested in the alchemical and Faustian nature of our development of technology.
The AI “black box” is a section of machine learning cognition that is completely unavailable and illegible to researchers. How is this any different than, say, Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head? (The Head’s prophecy, it should be added, was “Time is—Time Was—Time is Past.”) The photographs reflect this blend of anachronistic technology and black magic. In To Transmogrify, a peasant is held down to the soil as a red laser touches down on his forehead. His expression is one of anguish, and a second hand presses against his head as if part of a baptism. The technological presence is a violation of the medieval conception of grace and order, a mark of time’s deviation into a sharp, uneven fissure.
My work is an archaeological photographic practice—not through archival means but
through recreation and resuscitation. The past is not being recreated in yearning for the dead but in an effort to find habitation for the living. It is an effort to answer questions steeped in the "now" through the "then." In alchemical terms, the photographs are necromancy. I resurrect history not to revere it but to rupture it, to ask if we can live in the past as we haunt the present.
-Words by the Artist, Andrew Boynton.
The prevailing word of 2024 was the self-diagnosing term "brain rot," used to visualize the
process of mental degradation at the hands of technological super corporations and the apps and media they produce. Our ability to occupy the present is slipping away, and instead, people are seeking asylum in the past or future. Take, for instance, the SCA (Society of Creative Anachronism), a group of thousands of people who gather throughout the year to live a medieval life together, waging wars with no sides in the middle of the Mississippi woods. But peeking its head around every corner are reminders of the present that everyone runs away from so desperately. Golf carts, cameras, and phones contrast with the shining armor and canvas tents. Technology here is totemic. In Death Shall Not Keep You From Me, a pair of lovers lay impaled together on a sword in an act of Arthurian love, but watching on just behind them is an array of red lights. The technologic gaze is algorithmic and cunning.
I am interested in the alchemical and Faustian nature of our development of technology.
The AI “black box” is a section of machine learning cognition that is completely unavailable and illegible to researchers. How is this any different than, say, Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head? (The Head’s prophecy, it should be added, was “Time is—Time Was—Time is Past.”) The photographs reflect this blend of anachronistic technology and black magic. In To Transmogrify, a peasant is held down to the soil as a red laser touches down on his forehead. His expression is one of anguish, and a second hand presses against his head as if part of a baptism. The technological presence is a violation of the medieval conception of grace and order, a mark of time’s deviation into a sharp, uneven fissure.
My work is an archaeological photographic practice—not through archival means but
through recreation and resuscitation. The past is not being recreated in yearning for the dead but in an effort to find habitation for the living. It is an effort to answer questions steeped in the "now" through the "then." In alchemical terms, the photographs are necromancy. I resurrect history not to revere it but to rupture it, to ask if we can live in the past as we haunt the present.
-Words by the Artist, Andrew Boynton.