Digital and physical ruins are the story of our future. New Ruins encourages the viewers to reconsider the materials and the extent to which we are digitally mediated. The works tear down our normal perception of digital things and changes the way we position ourselves within and amongst them.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

Through this body of work, Jordan Fowler fabricates imagined ruins composed of a high degree of digital elements; through which he signifies that digital systems highly affect our world both structurally and residually. Digital forms and systems are able to be ruined, like that of an architectural ruin. Through file corruption, compression, encoding, outdating, glitching; digital elements can decay and erode in ways that are reminiscent of physical ruin. Additionally, generative digital systems can grow, evolve, and adapt; traits that mirror nature. Fowler leverages new ways of exploring digital forms and systems, understand the underlying logic that makes and breaks them, and integrate their presence into an existing aesthetic tradition of ruins.

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Featuring forms reminiscent of something architectural and mechanical, his large scale assemblages imply functionality but remain ambiguous. This look is achieved through layering and blending foam packaging and deconstructed machinery such as computers, printers, and appliances. In addition to these implied functional systems, organic systems are inserted as vines, roots and branches. These organic forms often mimic or coalesce with the functional forms by blending into wires, plugging into circuit boards and grafting to machine parts. In addition to these functional and organic forms, digital structures are inserted as CNC cut plaster castings and plasma cut steel fragments. The origin of these digital objects are extractions of glitches from ruined digital videos and images. Embodied as physical glitches, these forms assimilate and blend with the other forms in similar ways to the organic structures. All these forms, mechanical, architectural, organic, and digital are hybridized underneath thick layers of acrylic bonded cement. The resulting structures exude a heavy and aged presence. Thick applications of cement homogenize the forms into seamless systems, with surfaces appearing like eroded stone. Layered over the cement surfaces, projection mapped animations move across the forms. Projections of glitching video, often referencing the subject matter and composition of the sculptures interact with the interconnected systems, confusing the tangibility of the works.

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Fowler's work titled Generative Ruins is a set of procedurally generated algorithms embodied as sixteen sculptural 3D prints deposited in faux copper PLA. This series experiments with the paradoxical nature of rationalizing ruins; a process that is entropic and irrational in essence. The forms are digitally grown from a pair of algorithms to produce vines and roots entangling eroding architectural forms in dramatic compositions. To influence new forms and relationships within the system, he manipulates a variety of user inputs and scalable parameters. By parameterizing the visual aspects of ruins, this combination of systems leverages the computer’s ability to infinitely randomize outcomes and generate unique ruins.

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His works are designed to prompt the viewer to consider the extent to which our world is digitally integrated. How does this digital integration modify, automate, imitate, coalesce and create as technology scales? He uses ruins as a type of artistic medium to explore this question among many others in an increasingly digital world.

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New Ruins artist interview | https://youtu.be/03dNx4CWR0I