WHAT IS MATERIAL
Sculptures and artworks have held time in their materiality, but what if the materiality is finite or restricted?
What does it truly mean to have artwork as digital twins and copies, and what happens if the whole energy grid goes down? If an artist can not make it physically, how can they continue to create? Is it all about language and media instead of materiality?
Sculptures and artworks have always held time within their materiality. Stone, bronze, clay, or plaster, they absorb the gestures of the maker and carry them forward, enduring weather, touch, and decay. Material has been our proof of presence. It testifies: someone was here. But what happens when materiality itself becomes finite, restricted, or replaced?
What does it mean to speak of digital matter, pixels, code, and data as the new clay of our age? If an artwork exists only as a digital twin, does it still hold time in the same way? Instead of storing sculptures as empty shells in silicone and plaster, storing them in pixels might be a better use of space and material. We speak of preservation, of archiving everything, yet our entire cultural memory now relies on an energy grid that could falter or be hacked. If the power goes out, what remains of the digital museum, the 3D scan, the cloud-stored artwork? We become a lost civilisation.
Perhaps the illusion of permanence that digitality promises is more fragile than the marble that cracks or the plaster that rots. And if the artist can no longer make physically, if touch, resistance, and material encounter are removed, how do they continue to create? Maybe art then becomes an act of language, of conduct rather than material. The artwork shifts from object to idea, from matter to transmission. How then do people interact with the engagement and consumption of art?
Material resists us; it has weight, temperature, and accident. It answers back. Without that conversation, does creation become too frictionless, too perfect, too silent?
Perhaps material, whether digital or physical, isn’t about what we make from it, but what it makes of us think, like with all art, it's what lies in the viewer's mind, heart and soul after encountering the piece, no matter if it's paint, pixels or stone.