An Artist’s Manifesto

An artist can no longer seek to destroy the world around them, as we are at a point in world history where there is truly nothing of value left to destroy. The artist must instead destroy themselves and effect change upon the world from the inside-out.

Why search for an image from the outside, when it is awaiting rescue inside.

I am an artist, my media is my consciousness. I project disturbing visions onto the walls of my cell. Freedom is a reality where the walls are washed clean, and the visions stop. I cannot choose the visions that I project only the intensity with which I view them. It is truly horrific when I wake up to find that the images were not imaginary, but instead represent the external world pixel for pixel. This is not an end, there is hope, but hope that is disregarded because it wears no Halloween mask. The movie plays on, frame after frame of pre-processed fear, colour adjusted death and microwavable meals. I sit and stare, out beyond the walls into figments of my imagination, but it can’t last. There is no escape from an intellectual prison we have constructed as our homes. Our fingerprints taint every surface, evidence that despite our screams, it’s a reality of our creation. These paper walls distort and deform before our eyes, following us like shadows cast from stone. There’s not much left to love in a paper thin world, where we are so scared of being human, that we spend money we don’t have, on new and more entertaining ways to pretend we are absorption machines. We are human though, albeit so drained of emotion that we prefer to dilute what we do have left, to varnish our insatiable projection walls.

I am human, but for how long? Save yourselves, I have a ticket to the projection room, where I intend to view my own death.

(December 2007)