Ian Hutchinson Art -- About

IAN

HUTCHINSON

Bio

Ian Hutchinson was born in 1981 in upstate New York. He graduated from New York University with a BFA in Film and Television and continued to live in New York City for several years afterward. In 2007 he found his way to Berlin, where he currently lives and works. Turning subjective emotional states into objective vignettes has been the back bone of his work. He explores both traditional and digital routes to find ways to focus the ephemeral into the concrete.
Artist's Statement

        Emotions lie exactly on the line between physical and ethereal. They have no specific form or mass, but come from a very physical place across our brain. They are the result of a series of electro-chemical sparks in our head and give rise to something quite unwieldy and intangible.   In fact, Emotions are literally digital.   The on/off messaging of firing synapses is strikingly similar the basic function of modern circuitry’s 1’s and 0’s.   The connection of our emotional world to our physical bodies is not too dissimilar between software and hardware, both can deeply effect, and even control, the physical form from which they are born. These works are an investigation of that circular relationship between physical and digital spaces.

         Using computer generated imagery and augmented reality, I am pushing digital sculptures into the physical world, maintaining their intangible material while still carrying the weight of very human, emotional conundrums. These figurative sculptures scrape against the real world. They are couched in our physical space while still playing by digital rules. The act of viewing the work creates a echo; an intangible emotion expressed through a physical form, rendered with a intangible medium into a physical space, projected into intangible video on a physical device.
         When the tangible and intangible touch, their boundaries become indiscernible and that is the moment I find fascinating. The pieces here are artifacts of these explorations.
AR Preview (Video)

Between Physical and Digital: Augmented Reality Sculpture - 2013

A preview of Ian Hutchinson's Augmented reality based sculpture. Including AR versions of "Falling II" and "Forget Me"
Falling Series
        The Fallers have let go, they are not fighting to right themselves or soften the landing or paralyzed with fear. They are relaxed, unconcerned with what was or will be and furthermore have completely let go of who they are. They are the essence of a person; memory, language, sexuality and culture are all sanded away. What remains is a smooth finished being, disconnected from the messiness of humanity. But the viewer is human, the viewer has a past and a future, they have open eyes to see, mouths to speak and a sexuality to drive them. The tension between these points of view form the center of these pieces.

        The Fallers have two forms: The images and the augmented reality pieces. The images are the protracted moment from the fallers point of view, serene, solitary, unending experiences. They have no background to give context or even motion to the figure. It is nirvana in the only way nirvana can exist; in a void. The fallers live wholly in themselves and have found a boundless world formed around that self.
         The Augmented Reality pieces, on the other hand, force nirvana against outside world. Context and location erode the peace of the faller but time twists it. The beauty of a suspended moment and the horror of the moments surrounding it, is where the heart of the AR pieces lay. By putting the faller into an environment the result of gravity becomes apparent. The objects below break and crack the body by suggestion, not action. They bring violence to the quiet of the faller themselves. Suddenly this post human can break and bleed. Suddenly, this digital being has weight and mass that can slam against reality, breaking glass and splintering wood. Suddenly the physical and ethereal, the digital and analogue, the body and soul, don’t seem that far apart.