Jennifer McKnight


	Jennifer McKnight St. Louis, Missouri
		Listen to this artist. (AU 80K)

My personal fascination with digital imaging gives new impetus to my passion for collecting. I collect what I think of as "significant objects." I gather intuitively, without predetermining an object's purpose. Some have become art materials, others, the muses of my artistic ruminations. Using the computer, these objects become a new sort of tool in the art-making process. They become raw data in the mindspace of the computer. The old beauty of the outdated household object must war with the sleek, efficient world of computer graphics software before a unified piece can be achieved.

These simple objects take on symbolic significance in their new sterile environment. This warring of materials is symbolic of American reactions to the current computerization blitz. For the average American computer illiterate, there are amazing frustrations to this increasingly cybernetic world. To come of age in the 'cyber-90's' is to come of age in an increasingly busy, depersonalized, environment, with no place for human error. In a time when just about anything can be numerically processed one is tempted to ask, "are we living life anymore, or merely simulating it?"

It is my intention to use these time-worn objects to address the issue of cybernetic growing pains. Even as these objects partake of our new relationships with numbers, they evoke an older sort of numerology, that divinely balanced art of old sanctuaries long ago invaded. And as much as the medieval times had their numerological masters, we, too are developing, a new art that is devoted to numbers, and eventually, a new cyberhaven for peace.