Studies in Non-navigation:

 

X-PECT NOTHING: Predeterminist Direction And Absolute Vectors

The xy-axis, in its clean mathematical neutrality and negative/positive coordinate system, evokes such concepts as cause and effect, supply and demand, symmetry, and quadrants—the latter which is what urban topography built itself one: the grid of city blocks.

This form of balance is almost like an inadvertent ying/yang Zen concept. The xy-axis makes a square, which is the milestone of Western thought. Our windows, televisions, books, magazine, rooms are all square. When something is not made with right angles, it is considered a corrupt form, an anomaly.

             When the xy-axis is titled it becomes an X, which also has its own set of evocations: the target, the vortex, the concave arrow pointing inward, the absolute vector. The cityscapes of Jimmy Chen primarily consist of an X shaped composition. The foregrounds recede to their vanishing points following the shape of an X, towards its center. The X is a metaphor: The lack of choice in a hermetic system in which there is only one direction. People walk through urban mazes—and while distracted by the sounds and lights and signs—their choices are limited. We can only move forward, pushed by the obstinate march of strangers behind us, all of us sharing the same fate: one that, faithless, tries to control the world with cerebral concepts nicely laid out on paper.

The world of paper is now the world of binary code—0s and 1s of 00010010101001001101—the code behind the code (scripts) which operate everything from the internet to cell phone calls to video games. It is not surprising that our current digital zeitgeist also relies on math. And in the end, as wonderfully exemplified by the video game Grand Theft Auto, a perfectly rendered cityscape far more pictorially correct than any mere painter could make. Perhaps painting is indeed dead, and that the ‘virtual’ and somewhat laughable beatings and muggings in Grand Theft Auto reflects a violence that is not just about petty crime. The violence of today is spiritual, against God. We believe more in the X and the Y than the human X-perience and the big WHY?

Grand Theft Auto, still frame