Joseph Ravetti BFA Intermedia Thesis Spring 2018

FOINCORG

FOINCORG takes the form of an exhibition which will take place in B10 on Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at Pacific Northwest College of Art. I have produced a website in relation to the exhibition, titled Font of Information with the url: fontofinfo.neocities.org. However I will be using FOINCORG to encapsulate both the exhibition and website as it is simply an acronym for the url and both exist as one body of work.

What began as an abundant reservoir of information, which I deemed to exist in an archive known as GAK, this body of work is just a slice of that archive, published by gakindex.info. GAK can be summarized as an enigmatic organization that is determined to find and collect historical and phenomenological experiences, whether that be digital or physical. Gakindex.info is simply their publishing branch that disperses information in the form of bound paper and websites. To formulate what aspects of the archive I wanted to focus on for this specific body of work, I sorted through my documents and spreadsheets (the archive) that contain both found and personal information. Eventually, I decided to focus on experiences of synchronicity, paranormal activity, extraterrestrial phenomena, and repeating matter in contemporary media and historical events. What ties all this somewhat disparate information together is my subjective recognition of patterns, which I have come to know as apophenia, the “drawing of connections and conclusions from sources with no direct connection other than their indissoluble perceptual simultaneity,” according to Benjamin Bratton, a sociologist and design theorist. As mentioned before, I digitally generate documents and spreadsheets to contain what I call “marks of thought” whether they be appropriated or experienced. Similar to what I proposed, I have constructed an imaginative world that falls on the blurred line of fiction and nonfiction through the use of this information as well as objects/artifacts I have made. The website emulates my research process in many different ways, most directly through the scattering of content and sense of absurdity. The objects, which I refer to as artifacts in the context of exhibiting, are firstly the result of my experimentation with materials such as plaster, oil, pigment, and found objects. Most importantly however, they are the result of my capability to produce physical manifestations from digital information, whether that be in the form of text, image, data, etc.

There are six sculptures in total, two of which take the form of multiple bodies. All of them can be seen on the homepage of fontofinfo.neocities.org in their digital and somewhat original forms. The setting that they exist in digitally, appears as a collage of images, which is referential to their origins as artifacts. The narrative behind this work is subtle yet embedded in both the materiality and treatment of the objects as well as in the text and images provided by the website. I left the narrative to be ambiguous and open-ended for the sake of allowing the viewers and users to emulate my research and making process, by generating meaning from seemingly unrelated things. Going forward, I will be enacting similar processes to the ones I used in making this body of work; as I consider this exhibition to be the emergence of a foundation in which I generate meaning and information from.

49 albums

Spring 2018