Joe Stevens

I use the grid to provide structure to my life and art and to provide freedom from sensory overload. Placing certain restrictions means it is easier to focus on what is relevant and important to me as an artist and as a person. The main concerns in my activities as an artist are media technologies, art history and the performativity of algorithms; the notion of software and interactivity; how software is linked to marketing, branding and consuming; the relationship between the inside and the outside, the code and the environment, the biological and the technological and the role of the artist in the context of media art. Through research-led practice I use the grid as a methodological tool in order to demonstrate how the grid is not a work in itself, but a means of creating it. If the grid is a starting point for study, must it follow that nothing before the grid has any relevance? The grid exists by and for itself, with the ontological assertion that its structure is without precedent, extending in all directions, to infinity and beyond. My focus therefore regards the question: How can the grid function as a methodology for artistic practice?

The idea of the grid acts as a framework that underpins all of the work that I do be it sculpture, performance or painting. I believe that an artist can forgo specificity of form and instead opt for a diverse range of output that is concretized not through media but through a consistent theory that eschews any kind of hierarchy or bias. That way, the work and the ideas behind them hold equal emphasis. Integral to this approach is an openness of thought and action, the realization that what is made is not derived from the self, but from truth. The work is not centrally governed by an omnipotent artiste, rather by an external order that is noticed and thus acknowledged. This is the role that I choose to adopt. I will follow it until such order can be disrupted and overcome.

Before, I have made sculptures out of candy whose appearance was derived from the algorithm, or set of instructions, contained within each packet. The colours of each individual piece of candy were translated into directions and the candy then placed directly onto the floor in geometric patterns. The results were subsequently translated once more into actions. Later, I translated the same pattern into strips of coloured tape.