By definition, technology is the sum of a society's or culture's practical knowledge, especially with reference to its material culture. Our material culture includes machines, equipment, systems and objects we have created. The objects we create become the filtrate of our encounters and dealings, our experiences and actions. This filtrate is the confirmation of something else that has happened. This happening is the principal action that unites mind with spirit of place.
Twenty-first century myth meets thirty-first century reality. The creations rule over the creator. Planet Earth is habitat to man-machines and machinated potentates. The works of Derrick Makutay reflect that habitation/co-habitation of humanity and technology. Set in the ghoulish, garish, nightmarish landscape populated by automatons and machines, Macutay’s rich figures and characters illustrate the current and evoke a mental picture of what lies beyond. Like a death knell, such symbolism altogether reverberates of a future bound by the dictates of cables - technology’s circulatory and nerve pipelines. Makutay becomes the master of the chillingly preordained doomsday where human memory has to be quantified by gigabytes.
Yet entrenched within Macutay’s canvases, there lies that deep, dark, discernable beauty of something wonderfully alien. Makutay cleverly focused on subject matter, representation and narrative in his art while fusing the free interaction of the virtual bringing about a condition of perception no different from an electric shock.
On another plane, that man and machine suspense-action-drama also elicits that societal interplay where the technophiles are mere minions in the technostructure; where to evangelize for modernity is to technologize; where the climax of this technothriller is the continued divide between the powered and the powerless.
Thus in this pictography of the next wave of civilization where life and time shall be measure by gigabytes-per-second, Macutay’s works embody that grand narrative and that crisp and ironic play of style laced with the metaphysical cynicism at the expense of the real. Futuristic. Virtual. Aesthetically cyber. Whereupon even etymologically, the word “technology” comes from the Greek word “tekhne” meaning “art.”
Twenty-first century myth meets thirty-first century reality. The creations rule over the creator. Planet Earth is habitat to man-machines and machinated potentates. The works of Derrick Makutay reflect that habitation/co-habitation of humanity and technology. Set in the ghoulish, garish, nightmarish landscape populated by automatons and machines, Macutay’s rich figures and characters illustrate the current and evoke a mental picture of what lies beyond. Like a death knell, such symbolism altogether reverberates of a future bound by the dictates of cables - technology’s circulatory and nerve pipelines. Makutay becomes the master of the chillingly preordained doomsday where human memory has to be quantified by gigabytes.
Yet entrenched within Macutay’s canvases, there lies that deep, dark, discernable beauty of something wonderfully alien. Makutay cleverly focused on subject matter, representation and narrative in his art while fusing the free interaction of the virtual bringing about a condition of perception no different from an electric shock.
On another plane, that man and machine suspense-action-drama also elicits that societal interplay where the technophiles are mere minions in the technostructure; where to evangelize for modernity is to technologize; where the climax of this technothriller is the continued divide between the powered and the powerless.
Thus in this pictography of the next wave of civilization where life and time shall be measure by gigabytes-per-second, Macutay’s works embody that grand narrative and that crisp and ironic play of style laced with the metaphysical cynicism at the expense of the real. Futuristic. Virtual. Aesthetically cyber. Whereupon even etymologically, the word “technology” comes from the Greek word “tekhne” meaning “art.”
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