Recent work by Jack Youngblood

EXELCIORMORTIS

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Copyright © 2008 by Martin Constable (Jack Youngblood) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

http://www.jackyoungblood.co.uk

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CONTENT Ksastria Gameworks

Forward

Death by Photoshop

Real Fiction

Works

Text from David Barrett

Selected Press Quotes

Selected Biography

Exelsior Mortis Creative Team

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Ksatria Gameworks Pte. LtdKsatria Gameworks is a wholly Singaporean games studio located in

Jurong East. The international team of developers is from such places as the UK, France, Sweden, Spain, Hong Kong, Indonesia and of course Singapore. The vision of Ksatria Gameworks has always been to create a world-class development studio capable of producing world-class games, a company measured on the quality of its work rather than its cost.

Ksatria Gamework’s first title will be based on the hugely popular LoneWolf game books series, which have sold over 10 million copies to date and been translated into over 18 languages. This seminal games book series changed the face of gaming in the 1980s with its immersive second-person gaming experience and its complex, multi-threaded game play. It is currently enjoying a new lease of life with the publishing of a fully revised edition by its original author, Joe Dever. Ksatria’s LoneWolf: Flight from the Dark is due for completion in 2009 and will be available on PC, XBox 360 and Playstation 3.

It will be powered by an in-house designed game technology called kjAPI which comes with a powerful and user friendly toolset that provides a locally based competitor to the more established engines currently available on the market. From the beginning of its development the focus has been on ease of content creation, which in turn maximizes the creativity of artists and designers in the pursuit of creating top quality games.

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FORWARDJack Youngblood is the creative alter ego of Martin Constable who teaches Digital Painting at the School of Art Design and Media (ADM,

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). The work pictured in this publication was produced as part of an artist in residency program which was hosted by Ksatria Gameworks (see facing page). The residency was supported with a Start Up Grant (SUG) from ADM and many of its students and staff have helped in its making.

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When Nicéphore Niépce invented the camera in 1824 he also re-wrote the artist’s job description. His ‘reflection machine’ could outdo the painter’s ability to record, celebrate and critique the world. After all, who wanted a painting of a loved one when their photograph was on hand? Who wanted a sculpture of a naked lady when a movie of one could be had and who wanted a woodcut of a news item when a camera crew was on site?

A mean reading of what followed would be that the artists moved to the Parisian Left Bank, sat around café tables in small groups and sulked. Their art became an argument about art itself (modernism) and when eventually the subject matter had run dry, their art became an argument about the argument (Post Modernism).

I do not know if this reading of art history is fair, but I feel that the revolution started by Nicéphore Niépce’s machine is changing direction in a manner that will once again re-define what artists do and the purpose that they serve.

Oil paint and photographic emulsion each come with its own particular set of strengths and weakness. It was the introduction of its compositing technology (see box: Compositing) in version three that heralded the adoption of the word Photoshop as a verb (see box: A Short History of Photoshop) and it was compositing technology that brought together these two mediums.

...“is this hybrid no more than a set of smoke and mirrors for artists to play with or has something genuinely di!erent made an appearance?”

DEATH BYPHOTOSHOPEssay by Martin Constable

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Consider this: do the battle sequences in Lord of the Rings (that most composited of movies) appear convincingly real? I think the answer for most people would be ‘no’. However, do they therefore appear faked? Again I might presume another ‘no’, yet these sequences still convince us. They have the authenticity of the photograph yet are capable of suspending our belief in a way that used to be the province of painting.

Is this hybrid no more than a set of smoke and mirrors for artists to play with or has something genuinely different made an appearance? If so, exactly what form will it take and where will we find it? Artists are a slow moving bunch, always following and never leading, so you can be sure that it will be a long time before that question is answered.

In the meantime: go to the web forum deviantart.com and peruse. You will find yourself in the playground of the digital hobbyist, who is armed with cracked software and is informed by manga, gaming and the latest effects-heavy blockbuster. There you will see acres of derivative flotsam and visual vulgarity. However, you will also witness an energy absent from even the liveliest fine art forum and it is powered by young people who are without the prejudices of their art teachers. When eventually the prejudices of these pioneers have matured perhaps we will find that Nicéphore Niépce’s reflection machine has been turned to face the opposite direction.

www.xkcd.com

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genie had been un-corked.

They touted it around various companies (Apple, Industrial Light and Magic and numerous others all could have had it, had they wanted it). On the way they changed its name twice (once to ImagePro and once to PhotoShop) and eventually licensed it to Adobe.

Adobe at the time was big in the font world. In those days the

idea that something could be printed so that it would look the same as how it appeared on the screen was nothing short of a miracle, and Adobe was the miracle worker. However, as miracle workers go they were rather a dull lot. Their lack of passion for anything other than fonts was evidenced when they set about changing the name of their new acquisition. After much wrangling the best they could do was to convert the ‘s’ in PhotoShop to lowercase.

Photoshop grew to serve many other different creative

When, in 1988, Thomas Knoll found that his new Apple II computer did not come with an application that could display grey scale images he set about making one. His two hobbies were photography and computing and it was only natural that they came together in this way.

His brother was of a slightly different cast. Ever since seeing the first Star Wars films John Knoll

had nurtured a passion for visual effects that was eventually to lead him to a job as the lead visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic.

Together they worked on Thomas’s code and released it as a little application called Display. To begin with all it did was display images, however at John’s behest Thomas added to it the ability to change the way the tone was distributed within an image. With this addition their image viewer had become an image editor and the

A SHORT HISTORY OF PHOTOSHOP

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communities: web artists, designers, publishers etc. The current version (CS3) is more than 1,000 times larger than the first one (Photoshop 1 was small enough to e-mail to someone) but at the core of it’s creative DNA is that fact that it was built by a couple of guys who loved photography and like all men in love they could not be happy until they had changed the object of their affection.

“...Photoshop 1 was small enough to e-mail to someone”

In 1994, Photoshop introduced the layers pallet which gave us the ability to place one image over the top of another (such layering was possible in earlier versions but very tricky).

Just placing two images on top of each other does not often give us anything of value. Masking, color adjustment and digital painting is needed to bring them together. This bringing together is known as compositing and practically everything you have seen in the cinema, on TV or in magazines in the last ten years has, to one extent or another, been composited.

Photoshop was not the first commercial digital compositor nor is it the only one: there is an open source alternative called Gimp and in the movie industry applications like Apple’s Shake rule the roost. However, it was Photoshop that brought compositing to the masses and it was its ability to composite that marked the adoption of the word Photoshop as a verb.

Photoshop is the only piece of software to have been granted this distinction.

COMPOSITING

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An artist’s identity is a thing of questionable authenticity constructed ‘post-mortem’ to the facts. It’s author should remember that if a fictional life is to be a fruitful one it should be lived separate to the needs that move it. Men, both fictional and real, are complete if the thing they desire is beyond their reach. This pairing of a need with its frustration rounds off our perception of life with the knowledge that there are things that can humble it. This knowledge has a name: it is worship and it graces the man whom it possesses.

Such divine exigency has become increasingly hard to find within the confines of our mother Earth. Our home has been brutally compromised by our lousy stewardship of it and one can not see a desert, jungle or ocean without seeing also man’s hand in it’s impending destruction.

The only slate remaining that is large and clean enough for our fearsome dreaming is space. Space! Naught but vacuum yet with the scope and authority of a god. Few men have not known the pleasure of looking into the infinite promise of a night sky without the pain of knowing that their desire to embrace it will always be frustrated. Yet there are some who have kissed its shadow and it can be through them that we can vicariously attain this embrace.

... “"at where

we can not go

we send instead

our avatars”

REAL FICTION

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“I could have gone on flying through space forever.”When YURI GAGARIN became the first man in space the spacecraft that he rode was little more than a converted missile and the mental and physical stresses that it subjected him to nearly broke him. When he returned to earth he was obliged to keep his achievement secret from everyone including his wife. He was a hard drinking, womanizing, charming Russian peasant who was large enough in every way to be equal to the expectations that history placed on him.

Yuri Gagarin

“You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing.”

CHUCK YAEGER was the first man to break the sound barrier. A test pilot of rare skill and old-fashioned courage he seemed the natural choice when the Apollo team was scouting around for potential candidates to participate in their space program. However, the fact that he did not have a university education was held against him and he was never to make it into space. He remains, however, a ‘proto-spaceman’ being every inch of the right stuff.

Chuck Yaeger

“I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. "ere is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can

feel it. I’m a... fraid... ”

David Bowman

Stanley Kubric’s 2001 a Space Odyssey is an exceptional film that moves at a stately pace, matching the glory of it’s subject matter. In it’s two and a half hours only one thing happens: Dr. DAVID BOWMAN becomes a god. His trip through the ‘star gate’ is ten minutes of sublime cinematic excess.

(Hal to Caption David Bowman)

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WORKS La, La, La! When All is Lost and There is Nothing Left To Celebrate: Celebrate the Loss!

“...And When I Die?”

Skull

Red Rocket

Hope is the Kingmaker

Blast Option Go!

Omni Fragathon Now!

Jack Youngblood Will Touch Your Rotten Heart

Primate

Wildlife

AS15-M-0415, 0422 and 1838

Perlin, Voroni and Variable Roughness

Release me from Myself, Unlock my Heart and Invert my Expectations

Exelcior Mortis

Hell in the Ladygarden

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La La! When all is Lost and there is Nothing Left To Celebrate, Celebrate the Loss! 100cm x 150cm Mixed media wall painting 2008

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“...And when I die?”Digital print

40cm X 53cm2008

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Skull Digital print 76cm x 58cm

2008

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Red Rocket Digital print 76cm x 58cm

2008

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Hope is the Kingmaker Digital print 108cm x 200cm 2007

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Blast Option Go! Digital print on T Shirt 2008

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Omni Fragathon Now! Digital print 50cm x 60cm 2008

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Jack Youngblood Will Touch Your Rotten Heart Mixed media 12cm x 20cm x 3cm 2008

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Primate Mixed media (digital print and paint) 50cm x 45cm 2008

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Wildlife Digital print 60cm x 44cm

2008

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AS15-M-0415, 0422 and 1838 (enhanced photographs taken during the Apollo 15 Lunar Mission) Digital prints 30cm x 30cm

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Perlin, Voroni and Variable Roughness (procedural terrain editor material preset) Digital print 30cm x 30cm 2008

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Release me from Myself, Unlock my Heart and Invert my Expectations Digital prints (stickers) 5cm x 5cm 2008

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Excelsior Mortis Acrylic and oil on board 109cm x 208cm 2008

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Hell in the Ladygarden Digital Print 23cm x 40cm 2008

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JACK YOUNGBLOOD: BORN TO BURN

Essay by David Barrett

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire o! the shoulder of Orion … I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate … ”

– Roy Batty (N6MAA10816), Blade Runner

Avatar is a term that describes the virtual characters that represent players in videogames. Our avatars are the ciphers for our vicarious adventures. We send them into virtual worlds – usually into battle – to experience the majesty of fantasy worlds that we cannot enter. They see the things that are beyond human experience, such as those described in wonder in a final lament by the character Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer), leader of the renegade Nexus-6 replicant group in the film Blade Runner. The sentiment of this soliloquy is reflected throughout Jack Youngblood’s work, and is made most explicit in the title of one of his many self-portraits: …

The avatars that we send confidently into the spaces of our collective imaginations are rarely wearied by these

fantasies, however, and remain physically unblemished by their epic adventures. It is unlikely that videogame consoles lack the computational power to draw the effects of damage on their character animations, so perhaps another factor is at play here: while it is widely recognized that people tend to grow to resemble their pets, an inverse relationship is often to be found with their avatars – the older and weaker the player, the younger and stronger the avatar.

Youngblood does not succumb to this phenomenon of inverted representation; his avatars bear the scars of their long, hard journeys through fiction. What’s more, by incorporating the character of the artist within his work (Jack Youngblood is, after all, a pseudonym – a handle or tag for art’s game world), he suggests a symbiotic relationship between the avatar and the player, as if the player may also display physical manifestations of their avatar’s adventures.

The appeal of the avatar, beyond the fact that it can experience worlds beyond our reach, is the fact that it gives the player a sense of power and control. We dictate our avatar’s actions, thrilling at our god-like power. It is this same enjoyment that draws players to tabletop war games, where the world is laid out in miniature and given life by the player whose role is to play god from a heavenly perspective. The relationship between player and game world is that of god and creation. ‘God’ in the model of the Greeks: looking down upon the world, toying with it as a plaything.

DESCENT FROM HEAVEN

“My God … it’s full of stars.” – Dave Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey

The avatars in Youngblood’s work invariably take the form of astronauts. What is the definition of an astronaut? One who travels into space, literally journeying into the heavens. Since the heavens are the home of the gods, an astronaut – who also makes a home up in the heavens – must be some kind of god too. The god’s-eye

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view (and associated feelings of omniscience) that tabletop gamers enjoy over their domains must surely be shared by the astronaut when looking down upon planet Earth. Why do millionaires pay vast sums for gruelling and dangerous space-tourism trips? For that view of the Earth from space. The view that makes you a god.

This is why astronauts become laden with a new cultural potency when they return to Earth. Arguably it is this return journey that makes them so symbolically powerful; they have travelled into the beyond and yet now walk among us. From the heavens they descend, literally ‘cross down’ – avatar in Sanskrit: ava (down) tar (to cross). So astronauts are avatars, not just in the sense that they experience a realm beyond human experience on behalf of those of us left on Earth, but they are also avatars in the original sense of the term: they are the manifestation of a deity in human form on Earth, the incarnation of a god. Symbolically speaking, astronauts are no longer human, and it is this awareness that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke tapped into with the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is notable that the narrative culminates with the astronaut Dave Bowman not only becoming the immortal Star Child – a kind of god – but also that this divine creature, despite being flung across the cosmos, chooses to return to Earth.

It is the transformative power of knowledge, of experience, that produces this effect upon Kubrick’s astronaut. Bowman has travelled through the Star Gate and has had the mysteries of the universe revealed to him. (Interestingly, he has to fight off and shut down the malfunctioning computer, HAL 9000, during his journey to total understanding.) This is a traditional idea of the power of gods; they have power over the universe because they have overseen its creation, understand its history, can put it into perspective.

It is this quest for knowledge that Youngblood’s astronauts share too; his avatars are battered by the kinds of immense knowledge that the human brain has not evolved to cope with – this is the source of their wearied expressions. The humour with which Youngblood tackles this idea is reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ treatment of it in his book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, through the invention of an elaborate execution device.

The Total Perspective Vortex is supposedly the worst torture implement to which a sentient being can be subjected. It is a display machine whose sole purpose is to truly convey how infinitesimally small an individual life is in relation to the infinite vastness of the universe. This understanding, when properly grasped, is sufficient to kill the victim stone dead in an instant. As the book quips, this proves that in an infinite universe the one thing that sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. Indeed, your eyes would explode.

SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

“A film begins as a perfect idea and from there you work down.”

– George Lucas

One expression of the development of human knowledge is the varied use of perspective, and the history of Western art can to some degree be seen as the development of different rules for drawing perspective. As Erwin Panofsky noted in Perspective as Symbolic Form, rules of perspective are expressions of cultural thinking. Further, Panofsky pointed out that the Renaissance single-point perspective that Western culture has relied upon for centuries is as much a construct as any seemingly ‘naïve’ system of perspective. No system of perspective is inherently more correct than any other; they are all, to some degree, imperfect mathematical translations of 3D space into 2D form.

This is a point that Youngblood picks up on as he explores different methods of generating perspectival space. His two ‘Terrain’ images use different types of perspective – one is isometric, the other single-point. What’s more, within each of these there are different methods of terrain production (from compositing found photographic images, to fractal landscape generation, to 3D modelling, etc), with each paradigmatic technique containing its own set of assumptions and connotations. So, while these two works may appear to be about emptiness, they are in fact brimming with image-making significance.

PICTURE MAKING

“I don’t have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.”

– William Gibson

Through his art practice, as well as his essays and lectures, it is clear Youngblood is fully aware that art history’s evolving lessons in perspective, composition, depth-of-field, color balance, etc, have been learned by the entertainment industry, most notably in Hollywood. It is interesting to note that the people who are progressing the most advanced understanding of perspective these days are those who work in Hollywood CGI animation companies (such as Pixar or DreamWorks) and immersive game-engine development companies (like Epic Games, id Software, or Crytek). These are the industries that are continuing the development of ways of representing space that artists began centuries ago, generating methods of visualizing the world. If you want to know what the virtual worlds of the future will look like, extrapolate from the Unreal, Doom, and Cry game engines of today (their names give a clue to their sensibilities).

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It is the cultural ethos of these companies (mass-market, west-coast capitalism) that produces the visual culture that informs our wider understanding of image making. And what are the trademarks of their visual styles? They are convincingly immersive, yet exaggeratedly filmic and brash. When we encounter motion blur, lens flares, depth-of-field blurring, and distant color shift in, for example, a Pixar production, we know that these traditional effects of lens-based analogue media are constructs that the animators have designed in order to manipulate our expectations, banking on our knowledge of common filmic tropes.

These methods of image making are convincing because they rely on our prior cultural experiences: they understand how we expect things to look. In his writing, Youngblood has made the point that images from the Hubble space telescope are enhanced by NASA’s scientists so that they conform to a tradition of science-fiction imagery (which in turn borrows from Romanticism), and hence are more readily understandable – and more impressive – to the layman. Members of a general audience may not feel that they have much knowledge of traditions within romantic landscape painting, but we are surrounded by reproductions and these historical artworks seep through our retinas and into our subconscious minds.

This is why the film and videogame industries have chosen to utilize the techniques found in old-master paintings as a way to make their constructed productions more familiar and recognizable. These industries have extended this existing visual language – an historical language – into digital media. A point that Youngblood has made is that the mid-19th century Hudson River School of painters utilized old-master techniques to make the New World of the Americas seem as familiar as Old Europe. (Similarly, it’s no surprise that the New World was given Old World names rather than keep the Native American names – Scheyischbi became New Angouleme, then New Amsterdam, then New York as it was passed between various colonial rulers.)

So we can see that Youngblood’s old-master techniques are a reference to Star Wars as much as to Velazquez. And it is with a nod to this fact that Youngblood has produced his mainstream-consumer oriented ephemera: stickers and T-shirts, such as Blast Option Go!, Omni Fragathon Now!, and Jack Youngblood Will Touch Your Rotten Heart. If Hollywood can borrow the traditions of painting, so Youngblood can appropriate the trappings of mainstream fan culture too.

FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

“Any su#ciently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

– Arthur C Clarke

While we are familiar with the complex 3D-modelling and compositing effects that generate the SFX bangs in blockbuster movies, the more pervasive image-manipulating technologies are

the retouching abilities of Photoshop. We see the results in every celebrity photoshoot, magazine cover, and endorsement ad. Some celebrities even have their own in-house image manipulators, working on turning photographs from simple representations into officially approved likenesses or icons (as in the tradition of Russian religious icons, where the image of Christ is actually considered to be a piece of Christ – a subject rather than an object).

Photographs have undergone retouching ever since they were invented, of course. First this was done using paints and inks, while in the 1980s the advent of airbrushing added the smoothed-out gradients that the decade demanded. Andy Warhol commented:

“Beauties in photographs are different from beauties in person. It must be hard to be a model, because you’d want to be like the photograph of you, and you can’t ever look that way. And so you start to copy the photograph.”

The arrival of Photoshop, however, has caused a fundamental mode shift. No longer does there exist an original photographic print with ink applied over the top; now the digital photographic data is reworked using the exact same medium, so there is no difference – in signification or appearance – between the lens-based, photographically generated pixels and those that are the product of manual adjustment.

Photoshop is now the great rejuvenator, the fountain of youth, the Holy Grail promising eternal life, taking off the years that anti-wrinkle cream and cosmetic surgery cannot shift. It fixes the human skin, gives it that familiar creamy smoothness that is the hallmark of digital imagery. Youngblood – despite his name – exposes this by taking the opposite approach, the Picture of Dorian Gray approach. For him, it is the image that should age. Instead of smoothing everything down, he roughs it up. Youngblood uses digital manipulation as a form of attack, a curse, and in doing so he reveals the truth of the retouching process: that it diminishes the subject, questions the very existence of the subject.

THE DIGITAL AND LOSS

“While in theory computer technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by loss of data, degradation, and noise.”

– Lev Manovich

The idea of the endlessly perfect copy is not something that Youngblood subscribes to. For him, the digital is all about

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transformation and loss. The operative phrases are Export, Save As, Select Compression Format. Images are reworked, resaved, recompressed. In videogame technology, the code is always downgrading the mathematically generated visuals to match the limits of the display; as a player, you select your monitor’s refresh rate and display size, and the best frame rate for your graphics card. The vector-based code generates rasterized images, throwing away idealized visuals to turn out only images of a quality that the display can handle.

Not for Youngblood clones and uncanny replicants; his awareness of the loss, degradation, and noise of the digital realm explains his repeated use of zombies – degraded humans. In a journey into the realm of the truly digital, nothing material can survive. The ruined materiality of the zombie, such as in Hope is the Kingmaker, represents a failure of the physical, and alludes to the redundancy of the flesh in digital space. Excelsior Mortis, ‘superior death’: this work displays a knowledge of the perfection of the digital beyond – the realm of pure data – and an awareness of precisely what is required to reach it. Disembodiment.

THE DIGITAL AND DEATH

‘"e change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable.’

– Nicholas Negroponte

We have an uncertain relationship to the digital. Even if we do not understand the ins and outs of how digitally produced images have come to be, we recognize on some level that at their genesis they are code: pure, immaterial code. They are ones and zeros. Data. Bits. The bits are worked through programming languages and may manifest themselves in a printed image, for example, but we do not trust this material item because we still see the shadow of its digital ghost, its immaterial origin. The printed image is just one material expression of the data, and therefore unreliable as a true representation of the data-object that spawned it. We know that the primary attribute of the digital is its translatability; the same original data could easily have produced a larger or smaller image, on different paper, with different inks, different color balance, different resolution. We cannot trust that the thing we see in front of us is the thing itself (whose real essence, we understand, consists of binary data).

It is with this in mind – the idea of unreliable images emerging from a stream of data – that we begin to understand why so many of Youngblood’s motifs are placed against empty backdrops. For example, when discussing the production of the artwork The Gap Between His Expectations and His Achievements Grew but This Was Matched by an Increase in His Need for Vivid Excess, the artist stresses the need to ‘integrate’ the figure into the background, and yet the background itself is an ambiguous, dark backdrop where the only real interest is the figure’s cast shadow. It is important

in Youngblood’s work that the images never escape from this amorphous realm and remain tainted and tethered to the digital shadows.

In a sense, all of Youngblood’s works deal with the traditional vanitas theme: we come from nothing and we return to nothing. But in the realm of the digital it all happens so much faster – data is lost and overwritten in an instant. Indeed, this is precisely why so many people struggle with the idea of storing their precious aides memoires, such as photos and videos, in electronic form. If you have ever had a hard drive failure, or even just a file-write error, you will know how utterly lost data can be. While photos may become dog-eared or slowly bleach – their pigments fugitive in sunlight – they never disappear without trace simply because the magnetic grains on a spinning disk platter have been incorrectly magnetized to the ‘off’ pole rather than ‘on’.

For most computer users (i.e. those without coding or forensic data recovery skills), digital files are either working or not. Either absolutely perfect or totally lost. Their existence is therefore seen as unimaginably fragile – almost tremulous – as if they could wink out of existence and into the void at any moment. This is partly why Youngblood’s figures so often float in space; they could be engulfed by the darkness in an instant – reclaimed and reformed, or simply overwritten.

More important than Youngblood’s shadowed backdrops, however, is his addition of medallion stands: the small fragment of earth attached as a base to each figure. The characters are anchored and yet floating in the void, unable to throw off their final connection to the physical world and make the jump into the immaterial. Those that succeed in this journey are the necronauts, the travellers into the beyond.

We know that Youngblood made it through to the other side because we are left with his decorated skull – his prized and celebrated remains. And indeed we should celebrate him, celebrate his demise. For when our goal is material oblivion (that is, the attempt to match the highest forms of image-making within mainstream culture), then isn’t it a dive into the realm of the digital and death that we ultimately seek? As Youngblood put it in the title of his Born to Burn image: La, La, La! When All is Lost and There is Nothing Left to Celebrate: Celebrate the Loss!

David Barrett is an artist and critic who has written widely on art for a decade (Art Monthly, frieze, Art+Text, etc) and has also lectured at art schools and galleries (Goldsmiths, Slade, Tate Britain, Serpentine Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, etc). He completed his BA at the Byam Shaw School of Art in 1994 and his MA at the Slade School of Art, University College London, in 1997. He was Editor of eyestorm for two years, and a collection of his art writing and online artworks can be found on his website www.david-barrett.com.

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“He has gathered something of a cult following in the art scenes of Europe and Asia”Arts Central, June 2007 “"e work is clever, subtle and eloquent.”

Designer Magazine, Jan 2007

“...a significant marker for the painter’s departure from tradition, and into the unknown territory of digital painting.”Kok Boon Lim, Art in Singapore.org Sept 2006

“"is is digital trickery as a use of force, as well as a curse.”Art Monthly, Nov 2006

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SELECTED BIOGRAPHYJack Youngblood is a creative device that has been authored by Asst. Prof. Martin Constable who cur-rently teaches digital painting at Singapore’s School of Art, Design and Media.

Education1981-1982 St Martin’s School of Art, UK Foundation 1983-1986 Camberwell College, UK BA (Hons) First 1988-1990 Goldsmiths’ College, UK MA

Teaching1992-2000 Visiting Lecturer (Studio Practice), Central St Martin’s School of Art, London1995-1997 Visiting Lecturer (Drawing), Royal College, London1994-2006 Coordinator Extension Degrees / Visitor Programs, Goldsmiths’ College, London2006 – current Assistant Professor, School of Art Design and Media, NTU, Singapore.

ExhibitionsOct 2008 One man show: Post Museum, SinagporeMay 2008 Group show: ‘Gloaming’ in Grey Projects space. Sept 2006 One man show: ‘Eng Hoon Street Gallery, SingaporeFeb 2005 Group show: ‘Hand to Mouse’ Royal West of England AcademyFeb 2005 Group show: LOT gallery space, King Street, BristolNov 2004 Group show: Digital Print Symposium, Bristol Architectural CentreNov 2004 Group show: ‘The Relaxed Audience’ Jeffrey Charles GalleryNov 2004 Film festival: Exploding CinemaOct 2004 Film festival: RaindanceNov 2003 Film festival: Exploding CinemaOct 2003 Film festival: Raindance

Publications (featured in)Sept 2006 Artist of the week: IS Magazine, P 25, Published in SingaporeJan 2007 Design 360 Magazine (feature and article)March 2007 Cubes Magazine (feature and article)March 2007 Designer Magazine (feature and article)October 2007 Designer Magazine (interview)Nov 2004 Show ‘The Relaxed Audience’ reviewed in Art Monthly by David Barrett.Jan 2005 Showcase artist, 3D Users Magazine

TVJuly 2007 Featured artist in ‘Front’, Part of artscentral network (mediacorp)

Conference PapersThe New Technologies, the Old Masters and their Effect on the Look of the Contemporary Blockbuster.Delivered: TechnarteLocation: Bilbao Date: 25th May 2007 This artical was adapted for publication in the British painting magazine ‘Turps Banana’

Technical Commonality Between the Digital Composite and the Pre-Modern Painting. Delivered: EDMediaLocation: VancouverDate: 28th June 2007

Analyzing a Digital Image in a Way that is Useful to a Student of Art. Delivered: EDMedia, Location: ZurichDate: 5thth July 2007

Meeting the Particular E-Learn Requirements of a Digital Painting Course Delivered: EDMedia, Location: NTUDate: 28th June 2007

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THE EXCELSIOR MORTISCREATIVE TEAM

Thanks is also due to the many other people who helped in the production of this work.These include: Tien Wei Woon and Jennifer Teo of Post Museum, Yanyun Chen (‘YY’), Sarah Chong, Chan Poh Ling, Quek Choi Liew, Prof Isaac Kerlow, Khoo Li Ying, Kate Callister Kangaslahti, Asst. Prof. Oh Soon-Hwa, Joe Dever, Chris Yap of Lighteditions printing and Steve Riding and the staff at Ksatria.

Joel took over Phoebe’s role as source photographer as the project developed. Though still a student he has already developed into a photographer of considerable merit and has won several awards in the field.

Though photography isn’t her major, Phoebe helped me take some of the self portrait photographs used as source material in this project.

Viet Tu is currently on a one year sabbatical from the BFA Visual Communication course. Her advice on various design issues was extremely valued in the early stages of this project.

Subi came from Vietnam with much experience of design and art. She is the designer of the catalogue you are now reading.

PHOEBE HUI MEI CHOO3rd year BFA Product Design

CHUNG JOEL YUEN KONG2nd year BFA Digital Photography

TRAN NGOC VIET TUBFA Visual Communication

SUBI LE HONG PHUC1st year BFA Digital Photography

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