Eiko Yamamoto

"When looms weave by themselves, then man will truly be free."

-Aristotle The Politics

The advent and spread of digital technology has revolutionized all modes of production, distribution, and consumption in our global economy & society. Ruminative discourse on the potential promise of virtual democracy and individual empowerment via the global telecommunications network is almost as pervasive within social theory to popular culture as the World Wide Web.ÊHistorically, technology has been equated with progress, with the promise of a technological utopia or cybertopia (e.g. the 1960's forecast of the highly anticipated "leisure society" which never arrived). However, the impact of the digital age cannot be understated. Although technological utopia may never be realized, Michel Foucault offers an alternative in his essay, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopia (1967). Foucault observed "We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein."

This body of work is a hybrid production of "different spaces" heterogeneous in content and form made with digital sourcing, digital manipulation, and manual labor. Akin to a DJ that samples various existing sound recordings, reusing them as element in a new recording, this work is generated as a pastiche, sampling parts of other well-known or contemporary paintings and sculptures with other random jpeg images culled from the Internet. The work is further informed by Foucault's third principle that "the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible." Concepts are imbedded with the stuff of paint to create a bricolage of reconstructed images in which different locales of time and space are made to coexist in a single space. This series is intended to be reflexive of its making as paintings.