by
Friedrich Block
Curator
Brueckner-Kuehner Foundation
Kassel, Germany
Today Rimbaud's programmatic concept for aesthetic transgression has seemingly become an all-pervasive, postmodern reality. Networking and telematic culture have produced affects such as the indifference of the ego, the nomadic play with identities or the contingency of self-images. Emerging from the 'consciousness industry', and its symbolic and technological mechanisms, this is nevertheless distant to an individual, reflective, profound and poetic experience. In my view "IDfone", by Simon Biggs, convincingly offers an alternative vision to this paradigm.
"IDfone" disturbs the viewer's mechanically narcissistic gaze into the mirror-like screen. The reflection of the self is shattered, interfered with by the image of the other; obscurely addicted to one's own activity and to that of somebody else, controlled by a program which writes visual mosaics or collages: aesthetic differentiation, between identity and difference. As in many of his works, Simon Biggs is enacting a sensuous reflection upon the symbolic 'nature' of the self and on symbolisation itself as a way of world making, oscillating between real and virtual embodiment, (digital) text and (analogue) image, order and disorder, presence and absence, construction and deconstruction. This 'dia-bolic' interruption of symbolic processes opens up new ways of seeing and enables a poetic experience of the self and its environment. The site of poiesis is right here, in between.