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Fragmented Iridescence

Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xb932a70A57673d89f4acfFBE830E8ed7f75Fb9e0&token=10931&page=5

Source Link: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/fragmented-iridescence-10931

Date Minted:  June 11, 2020

Artist Description: This work presents a meticulously hand crafted digital interface to interact with large amounts of data pertaining to our cultural memory and collective construction of self, an exploration into databases and their ability to restructure information flows in a non-linear narrative.  

CohentheWriter’s Commentary:

Artist Julian Brangold says that his piece Fragmented Iridescence is an “exploration into databases and their ability to restructure information flows in a non-linear narrative.” But I think there’s more than that going on here. The structure of this piece immediately feels odd, seemingly like we’ve come upon something en media res, although whether we’ve come upon it in the process of construction or deconstruction is impossible to say. Ay, perhaps there’s the rub.

And so while Brangold may have intended his piece to represent how databases form together and quantify information, he can’t avoid codifying the other side of that coin, the database’s ability —or curse— to break information down into parts. It might be why this piece seems to display a confluence of incomplete objects. Half-finished faces devoid of their identifying detail and devoid of partitioning lines. A dot matrix that seems to just trail off, no information expressly communicated in its pattern, or no communication that we can pick up on. Reverberations and repetitions and random squares, random lines, misplaced and oblong polygons. It certainly seems non-linear, as Brangold mentioned, but the sheer accuracy of that descriptor is strange in a piece that has neither movement nor action. What does it mean for a stagnant artwork to be conceived of as non-linear? Is it a result of the artwork and the entropy that we may feel from it? Or is it more something we ourselves impose onto the piece, a result of the fact that we cannot perceive order, and so we consider the piece orderless? We cannot ascribe it easy or congruent linearity, and so we affix our experience onto the piece itself. Brangold says, “This work presents a meticulously hand crafted digital interface to interact with large amounts of data pertaining to our cultural memory and collective construction of self.” Messy stuff to begin with. No surprise that we’d find linearity obscured within it. But if a database can restructure information, so can we. We can invent linearity out of the rumbling red-and-black void. 

It starts with focusing on what we can recognize. Most notably, that means the seemingly-female bust which sits in the very center of the piece. It seems like a hand-drawn facsimile of a marble sculpture. It has the empty eyes of a statue that has long-since lost its paint. One can imagine it sitting in the MET, in the Uffizi Gallery, in the Louvre, one of an endless parade of Greek and Roman deities  occupying tables and pedestals in some grandiose, be-columned hall. Here it is stripped of its varnish, stripped of its stone and its setting, relegated to the very most basic bits of its visual information: line. Hardly even three-dimensional, its empty gaze faces to the left edge of the frame. It’s nose has been chipped away. It wears no discernible expression. This bust is the central gravitational force around which other archaic objects and insinuations swirl. There is the dot matrix hidden behind it and extending out either side. There are the facsimile pieces of its composition, aspects of it that seem to be copy-and-partially-pasted in different spots. Like the one to its left which contains the bust’s facial structure and nose, but no mouth, no hair, only one eye, and just the slightest approximation of a chin. Another, behind the original bust, copies only the back of the original’s head, a snippet of hair-covered quasi-stone. In a few spots, dense red squares appear at random, denoting nothing in particular. That said, they are the only areas of solid color in the whole piece, most everything else denoted by thin red lines placed atop a black-ish, somewhat-brownish background. 

The incompletions feel deliberate. One gets the sense that, in mimicking a database, multiple processes all vied at once to complete the requested image —the central bust— and those that failed, through whatever means, remain forever in a state of disappointed stasis. The remnants of a failed process. The marker of a dead civilization.

Using a Greco-Roman bust to demonstrate this principle is a clever stroke. What is a dead civilization but a process that couldn’t achieve its goal? Obviously, a human society is a much more sophisticated end-game than a database output, but we can extrapolate one onto the other. We can see humanity as one enormous database, and with every “successful” version of society created, there are attempted facsimiles that succeed only in mirroring minute aspects of the original. 

Perhaps that’s too arcane a reading of the piece. Perhaps reading further into such a discordant piece is a fool’s game anyways. What I can say with some certainty, however, is that, for me, there’s a kind of sorrow that pulsates herein. And I don’t know if it’s related to the composition as a whole, or if it’s the natural consequence of seeing objects that have been destroyed. I get the same feeling from seeing ancient cave paintings, the red hand prints and horses that communicated the existence of a person eons ago. “I was here,” it says, “But I am no longer.” And I get the same energy from Brangold’s piece. Because here we’re confronted with the failed background processes we never get to see, things outside of our awareness but existing nevertheless as petrified code. “I was here,” they seem to say. “I tried.” 

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