The New Sublime (2017)
James Clar is an American visual artist who uses technology as a medium to critique the dissociative affects of technology itself.
James Clar, media art, lighting art, light art, pop art, interactive art, led art, minimal, installation, 3d cube, jamesclar, light and space, new media, American visual artist, medium, dissociative, disruptive technology, technology
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Category
Work

The New Sublime

(2017)
video installation, 3D printed cityscape, camera, projector, motor, oil, water, aquariums, crabs
dimensions variable

A cylindrical cityscape is partially filled with liquid and slowly rotates. A live-feed camera zooms in where the liquid submerges the buildings and projects it large-scale; showing a tidal wave crashing through a city. The increase of scale creates visuals like a tilt-shift camera, between real and unreal, and the content is like the finale of a movie, but an ending that never ends.

Brought into the space are aquariums filled with crabs, overlapping our environment with the environment of water creatures whose earliest fossils date back to the Jurassic period.

The sublime within painting often depicted the immensity, turbulence, and grandeur of Nature, and the human response to it. Landscapes and seascapes, especially those from the Romantic period, often represented towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms and seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches which, if actually experienced, would be life threatening.

“The New Sublime” utilizes a dynamic visual system and installation elements to allow visitors to experience the notion of the sublime within our technological times.

*Exhibited at Day For Night, Houston 2017
Photo #3 Credit: Katrina Barber
Photo #5 Credit: Greg Noire