top of page

David Hunt


Bodies

The Body, a basic, universal starting point. From prehistoric bone carvings, Lascaux cave paintings, Vitruvian Man, Botticelli’s Venus, Picasso’s nudes, the preoccupation with the human form as subject has persisted. How we see the body and express it however is under constant renegotiation, often as new technologies evolve. From Van Eych's curved mirror, Vermeer' Camera Obscura, Warhol's Polaroids. In an emerging digital universe, it’s how rather than what you see that has become the issue, think of the James Webb telescope looking back in time, to Big Data and the ever expanding billions of images it contains. Bodies, is a series of works using game engine software to make randomly generated, ever changing, moving sequences from which screen shots are taken, enlarged and painted in oil on large scale, life size panels, or digitally printed, stored on SD Cards and displayed on A4 size Memory Cards - the translation and relationship between these technologies is seen as an important part of the dialogue, amongst others, that these works seek to address. In this series features bodies remain elemental as genderless, faceless, expressionless forms in unidentifiable virtual space - however, through the application of different physical forces applied in the game engine, narratives are triggered in the viewer - white labelling the blank forms, from their own experiences. A lone body free-falling through space or 9/11’s falling man?, ​

Figurines

Portraits

Like the Bodies this series uses game engine software to make randomly generated, ever changing, moving sequences. Unlike Bodies the elemental, featureless forms are overlaid with 3D scans and motion capture sequences taken from the 'real/material' world, an assemblage of multiple rather than singular realities. The line between material and virtual space becomes blurred - oscillating from one to the other. These Portraits are Hybrid digital structures using a range of media - sound, image, movement, taken in a fraction of a second or over an expanded time range. It was the development of perspectival space in the 15th century, later the camera obscura, photography - now digital technologies that are inevitably generating new structures, ways of seeing and recording. These Hybrid Portraits are large scale, life size panels. Fragments from the game engine sequences used in the development of the portraits are stored on SD cards and displayed on the A4 size Memory Cards - they are relics / ghosts


Paraphrases & Remixes

bottom of page