TEXTUAL · ARTIFACTS · SERIES

by Peter Ciccariello

ABOUT THE SERIES

Works in Textual artifacts are created using an array of 2-D and 3-D software programs and take their inspiration from common methods of archeological excavation. Just as ancient artifacts are deciphered through the recovery and examination of the remains of a culture, environmental data and detritus that they leave behind, these image artifacts represent the remains of poems and writings that have been eroded and battered in a digital process. That process attempts to dissect and deconstruct a text and then reconstruct that text as an evolutionary image. The final visual is created by digitally mapping the image with a copy of itself, in a sense, forming an archeological topography of the material essence of the image. This visual topography, created from the value scale of the image, is excavated from within the process revealing the remains, historical marks and gestures from the original source data. In this way, these images become metaphors of themselves, just as the incidental evidence of our human ancestors provide a reflective metaphor for our own lives.

A NOTE ABOUT PROCESS

This art is defined by process, a hybrid of the essential elements of painting, photography and writing. The digital matrix that is created is at the core of this work, provides a new form of plate printing, a virtual digital matrix that functions as the film negative in photography or the copper plate that is the basis of etching, intaglio and engraving printmaking processes. This digital image matrix now provides the possibility to be output from 3-D printers and realized as free-standing sculptures or in this case, sculptured wall hangings. This unprecedented freedom of instantiation provides the artist with the ability to output multiple types of art realized from the same original matrix.

In this sense, every instantiation of the matrix is an original with the unique aura of the artists’ conception. In an age of ever more sophisticated reproductive technologies the image matrix becomes the postmodern link to the artist’s hand. The abstract schema that becomes an imprint is akin to personal writing, instantiated as a new private language – part sign, part symbol and part code, this image surface becomes a non-navigational road map of fragmented and disassembled narratives, disruptive and de-centering yet at the same time oddly imbued with an inner, familiar, and abstracted order.

sister queens

tiny disconnects

map of the kindness of strangers

body as locus

raining tache

blue scrawl poem

homage to brancusi

after tender buttons redux

poem totally destroyed

soft poem after ryder

trash

mushroom

Peter Ciccariello finds his inspiration in the fields and forests of Northeastern Connecticut.

His work explores the fine lines between image and text, and is in constant inquiry about what is and what is not poetry.

Ciccariello’s work has appeared in print & online, in amongst other places, Poetry Magazine, Fogged Clarity, Hesa inprint, Leonardo On-Line, National Gallery of Writing, and also appeared  in the 2013 issue of MAINTENANT 7, A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art.

New work gallery – http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/
Poetry and writing – http://poemsfromprovidence.blogspot.com/

You can find my art and writing updates on Twitter
https://twitter.com/ciccariello On Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/peter.ciccariello