Justin Watson: a farewell to images

a farewell to images is the concluding chapter in a trilogy of works written and produced by Justin Watson (including nolandisland, 2016 and |human|, 2017) utilizing digital media as an apparatus to investigate communication, post-internet identity and existential inquiry. The three chapters are presented within the space to reveal the artist’s four year evolution of craft, philosophy and identity while working through the series.

a farewell to images is a visual poem invoking the evolution of images from antiquity to contemporary in connection to Andre Malraux’s Psychology of Art and his musée imaginaire by analyzing the cognitive relationship between images, artifacts and collections. Watson explores these notions of a mnemonic collection in relationship to personal identity, loss and trauma as society gravitates towards social engineering piloted by deep fakes, artificial intelligence and through the simplification of media-generating technology.

a farewell to images is an elegy to stillness, to silence and to solitude. As real-time video feeds abstract and accelerate ideologies and the documents in our living collections, we must remember:

we become what we see