Artist lecture: Joel Swanson

Joel Swanson, an artist currently lived in Colorado, gave a lecture in the end of January. The primary theme of his work focuses on technology and language. During his graduate years, he enjoyed to create experimental electronic literature pieces, and demonstrated them as digital narrative. However, after graduating from art school, he became more interested in word itself, the materiality of words, and how the structures of words affect the words meaning.

Swanson enjoys using neon light and blinking effect to explore homophone, which means words with the same sound but differ in the meaning, and words formation. Series of works here/there (2011), t/here (2014), Homophone (right, write, rite) (2014), un/non (2014), and NO/NOT/NOTHING (2014) are all the neon installations playing with the connection between structure and definition of words. He wants to tell the audiences that words are embedded to each other.

Another topic Swanson is interested in is indexicality. His piece Untitled (cursor) (2014) is an animation with a simple rectangle blinking on the upper-left corner of the white screen. Although the title does not provide any clue the content, the audiences have the superior connection with it, knowing the rectangle relates to some kind of technological purpose. He also explores linguistic questions in symbols. Logic Only Works in Two Dimensions is a fantastic piece. It is a large floating greater-than symbol. When smoothly rotating, the symbol frequently changes its own meaning.

Joel Swanson's works are accessible and give the audience a new way to have a look words and symbols. As art is usually practiced to refer some ideas, Swanson uses the language to build a stronger connection between art and conceptual language.

Untitled (cursor)

Logic Only Works in Two Dimensions