Saṅkhāra

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Saṅkhāra is a portrait of symbolic consciousness in three movements.

Colorful automata represents direct experience: touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste and thought in a ceaseless flow of novelty.

The automata congeals into form alluding to the way our minds close over experience with symbolic representation, like a plastic bag coming down over a kaleidoscope of butterflies. What was free in the open air is now trapped. What was previously wild and unpredictable is now under control, frozen and communicable.

The form’s dispersal mimics the release of mental formation, the unbinding of a symbol, the letting go of a belief. It’s a visceral reflection of the process of ceasing to identify with separateness. To strain the previous metaphor, it’s the opening of the bag and letting the butterflies return to the flow of raw, boundless experience.

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K.C. Austin
From his cockpit in the Blue Ridge Mountains K.C. Austin (aka bzor) spends his days shaping realtime software art systems of all stripes. Informed by game design, modular synths, virtual reality and consciousness research, K.C. plays shaders like a fiddle and fashions creative pipelines like a spider spins webs.

James Paterson
Fascinated by the relationship between ancient and futuristic mediums, James Paterson has been exploring a unique synthesis of drawing, code, animation and sculpture under the moniker ‘Presstube’ since 1999. Paterson draws inspiration from meditation, molecular biology, music, parenting and psychedelics - the seen, the heard, the felt, the cognized.